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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   3498 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 6, 2026

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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How much do you believe in physiognomy?

Sure, its obviously a pseudoscience. But it's also obviously real in some aspect.

I mention that because everyone in the Lindsay Clancy trial looks exactly like you think they would. The witch who murdered her children. The wronged husband. The elderly women who wanted to let her free. The lone juror who stood by his code. The kindly old defense attorney with a bleeding heart.

It feels like you can read a book by its cover, at least more than random chance would suggest.

We have Tik Tok women who believe Patrick Clancy's is obviously guilty because he looks mean. I think its easy to project a certain image of whatever stereotype you want because we literally have thousands of stories we can pull from that can likely fit any mental image we have. In fact I think being more well read (or more watched?) might make you more susceptible because you have a greater mental library to pull examples from.

If I had a steelman an argument, it's possible that "good" looking people are treated better throughout their lives and are more likely to develop a nicer/charismatic temperament. Conversely, "ugly" people are treated worse by their peers and are more likely to develop a negative temperament. But a big component of beauty is a reflection of the effort put in by the individual (as much as it can be faked by filters, make up, plastic surgery etc, even that requires some effort) and people that put effort into their appearance are more likely to be social (since they understand the social advantage of good looks). Good looks can be considered somewhat synonymous with good health, and healthier people are likely to be more positive compared to unhealthy people.

I dunno how much of that is just projecting what we already know about Lindsay on to her appearance. If her photo had been used in a human interest story about a local mom running a bake sale to raise money for sick kittens, I very much doubt you'd look at her twice. To me, she looks like a completely unremarkable suburban mother which, if anything, makes the enormity of her crimes even more disturbing than they would otherwise have been.

Look at photos of any convicted con man or fraudster, and my guess is that you'll consider them more handsome than the average person – many of them will likely have been said to have "a face you can trust". Despite what third-wave feminists would have us believe, most convicted rapists are not sexually frustrated incels, but rather men who already have lots of casual sex. The cad (the handsome, charming man who sweet-talks his way into a woman's knickers only to ditch her when he's had his fun) is an established archetype in basically every culture in the world. If physiognomy was a reliable guide to people's conduct, why do domestic abuse shelters exist (in countries which don't practise arranged marriages)? Why are there so many single mothers? Looking at the poor sexual and romantic choices made by women (made by people, arguably), the underlying cause in most cases is placing too much stock in physiognomic appraisals rather than too little.

Your con man argument actually argues for physiognomy, just an imperfect one.

I have a kind and approachable face, so people often approach me for directions or other things. And they’re right to. I am kind and approachable.

But let’s say that 1% of people with my physiognomy have criminal tendencies. Would it not be easy to prey on people? Certainly much easier for me than for the guy who looks like an extra in a mob movie.

But this is assuming the conclusion. How do we know that the majority of people with faces perceived to be "kind and approachable" actually are "kind and approachable"? How do we know that those two things are correlated at all? Why is that the null hypothesis?

We don't really. I feel that it's true but obviously no one is studying this rigorously.

Appearances definitely matter but it's hard to say how much is clothing and broad gender/racial characteristics. Nevertheless, if I see a guy with a face like this, I'm giving him some space.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Valuev#/media/File:Valuev-nach-Haye-Fight-2009.jpg

Wow, you're giving some space to the checks notes seven foot tall 324 pound guy? Can you give me some tips on your methods of physiognomick deduction?

Lol. But doesn’t he also have just about the ugliest face you’ve ever seen?

Acromegaly will do that to you.

It's a face that has just about no "beauty", but I wouldn't call it ugly. It's not deformed or anything, just a stereotypical testosterone gopnik face. It has the nobility of a well-formed specimen.

Should also consider that the picture was probably taken in the context where threateningly mugging at the camera is appropriate.

Nevertheless, if I see a guy with a face like this, I'm giving him some space.

Are you "giving him some space" because of his "physiognomy" (i.e. drawing inferences about his psychology from his physical appearance), or because he's built like a brick shithouse and could beat the stuffing out of you if he so chose? Just because the latter is true, doesn't imply that the former is.

Looking at the poor sexual and romantic choices made by women (made by people, arguably), the underlying cause in most cases is placing too much stock in physiognomic appraisals rather than too little.

I'd argue that this is a case of the opposite, it's just that the person choosing the romantic partner, whose radar for these things is broken for some reason. Everyone around are almost always able to tell immediately that the person is rotten, from barely more than a glance.

Looking at the poor sexual and romantic choices made by women (made by people, arguably), the underlying cause in most cases is placing too much stock in physiognomic appraisals rather than too little.

I'd argue that this is a case of the opposite, it's just that the person choosing the romantic partner, whose radar for these things is broken for some reason. Everyone around are almost always able to tell immediately that the person is rotten, from barely more than a glance.

If only there were some third party with a vested genetic interest in the woman's well-being to whom the choice of romantic partners could be outsourced...

Same goes for men. People insist on keep sticking their dicks in crazy.

But are they able to tell that the person is rotten based on their physiognomy or based on their demeanour?

A combination I'd wager. I doubt many people would make a confident prediction based on appearance alone (unless there is something really wrong), but I do think it communicates a fair bit.

Yes, I believe in it. There's no more advanced face-analysis system than that which is inside our heads, considerable evolutionary pressure went into our ability to understand other's nature and intentions. If someone looks like an evil witch, then there's some signal in that.

Like radar, it can be spoofed and jammed or evaded or pick up false positives. But it does work.

I largely don't, since it's mostly selection bias etc. There is potentially sometimes some truth to it, but not much. (There are some exceptions for, for example, autistic/Asperger's facial features. But autism is a lot more than just a personality trait.)

It is funny to joke about but it's mostly just right-coded pseudoscience and pseudointellectualism.

It's definitely pseudoscience. Can you imagine someone rigorously trying to study this in the academy. When that happens, I'll freely admit that woke is dead.

But what do you mean by "selection bias"?

I assume @monoamine meant something like: it's easy to look at a photo of Lindsay Clancy and think that she "looks" evil, but you probably see a hundred people who look a bit like her every day without thinking that any of them look evil, because they haven't done anything that might make you think that.

Or conversely, you might see someone with a "kind and approachable" face, learn that they volunteer for a charitable organisation in their spare time, and think "that checks out". But it never occurs to you that many other people who volunteer for charitable organisations don't have "kind and approachable" faces.

Is the magazine business viable in 2026? On one hand, obviously no. Subscriptions to magazines have been falling continuously since like 1980 or something.

But on the other hand, maybe yes? Magazines used to be insanely profitable. There is an anecdote about Conde Nast employees in the 1990s getting mad because they were forced to fly first class to their Christmas party in London instead of taking the Concorde that they were used to. There's still some magazines like Architectural Digest which must be absolute cash cows if they can keep their costs under control.

In the modern era, it would be trivially easy to produce a decent magazine with a couple of full time staff. Get a few thousand subscribers and it might be viable. Would people buy a non-shitty version of Wired?

Growing up I would read a ton of magazines, in highschool I probably read 6 or 7 different magazines every month. My dad would take me to the bookstore in my town and buy me whatever magazine I wanted. When I went away to college I had to pay for the magazines myself so I stopped buying them. I kept thinking about how nearly everything I use online is free- youtube, blogs (circa 2009) and so on, funded by ads, and how there were so many ads in every magazine I wanted to read, and how the good fashion magazines were so expensive even with so many ads. I didn't understand why they had to keep raising prices for the media when they were mostly probably funded by the advertising and I found it irritating to pay for something filled with ads. Lots of museums offer free admission now, you just pay for parking- why couldn't magazines be free and just get funded by the advertising? Wouldn't certain advertisers love to be in a free publication that people don't even have to pay to be exposed to?

Google Ads, if I recall correctly, cost on the order of $0.01 per impression. Even if we assume advertisers were willing to pay 10 times as much per print "impression" (questionable, since those can't be targeted as well and don't have a link you can bait people into clicking), how many ads would be needed in a magazine to recoup the writing, printing and distribution costs? If this is like $10 per copy (which seems like a realistic ballpark figure given the price at which glossy ad-free magazines are sold), there would have to be about 100 ads in it.

That's how the London Metro newspaper works, and these days I think also the Evening Standard.

I wish more publications operated that way. The $40 fashion magazine in the era of endless free entertainment baffles me (though I guess it makes me want them more since most people wouldn't pay for it. Maybe that's the secret.)

Would people buy a non-shitty version of Wired?

Oh man, I happened upon a 1999 Wired stuck in an old box of papers last weekend. The thing was so thick it had a spine and while visually bold had content for hours. The list price was $5.95 which inflation calculator tells me would be about $11.99 today. Seems steep for a magazine but probably worth it!

I would probably buy (as in, subscribe to) a non-shitty magazine about any of my interest areas, given a reasonable cost. Having something to read on the can is great. I am only partly joking here - since I spend most of my waking working hours behind the screen, a change of scenery when I am resting really feels nice to me. It's not about efficiency now but about the feel. However, I would not pay for a crap magazine that has 60% ads, 30% AI slop and the rest maybe interesting to me once in a blue moon. It must be consistently good. I don't know whether there are enough people like me to sustain a publication - maybe not. But I personally would.

Yeah, any AI content would have to be heavily suppressed. But it can be really useful as a research assistant. It's getting shockingly good at that. And research is most of the work anyway, so AI would majorly speed up the process. I bet it could do some decent layout work too, although this is far, far removed from anything I've ever worked on.

I don't mind if the writer uses AI as much as they want in the research. But if they just work as a meat proxy between LLM and myself, then the added value is close to zero. I can talk to an LLM directly when I want to. If I pay for something - and increasingly, that includes paying attention - I want to have added value that is not available in LLM prompts. If somebody does not want or is not capable of providing it, surely I am not going to pay for it.

Yes. The writer must have a voice and they must have taste. But good enough research is much easier nowadays. (I’ll define good enough as better than 90% of mainstream news articles)

Part of the issue with magazine economics is that subscriptions did not used to cover all of their costs, advertising did. But targeted advertising prices have plummeted due to google and meta, so magazines lost a major revenue driver.

Newspapers stay in business because they can target eg couponers for advertising based on geography, consumer habits(old housewives change their habits less than young people), and daily circulation, and thats still dicey.

Newspapers stay in business

Some do, anyway, with increasing difficulty. Circulation peaked in around 1990 and the decline still hasn't slowed. The one I interned for as a kid was shut down ... nearly 20 years ago now.

It's generally not a great idea to try to enter, or even to be among the last to leave, a shrinking industry. Status quo bias and loss aversion are serious things, so most of the people you'll be playing musical chairs against will be playing harder than you'll want to.

As I understand it there are really only four English-language newspapers that have ‘thrived’ since the big collapse.

The first is the New York Times, which built a very successful online subscription business on a highly diversified model, almost the newspaper equivalent to a full service MMO that has PvE, PvP, housing, crafting, LARPing, whatever. So the NYT signs people up for puzzles and games, for the weddings and modern love sections, for the book reviews, for the extensive cooking section, for the boomer liberal commentary, and for regional and national news, all of which are well staffed, and then that all feeds into the same pot, they cross-sell you on everything even for the things they let you subscribe to separately, and then they upsell you to the $400/year ‘All Access’ subscription.

The second and third are the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal, which superceded all the regional and local business papers and became de facto central reporting for financial markets where information is key to arbitrage, any client conversation, etc. They sell subscriptions directly and through third-party platforms like Refinitiv and Bloomberg, have lucrative events businesses, and go niche enough in terms of reporting that there aren’t free alternatives online if you want to read specific reporting on sub-niches in like investment grade credit funds or competition in the custodian business etc, it’s not something that CNN or the BBC news website can replace. They also still have a very large highly-paid audience which means both digital and print advertising continues to generate some income because luxury brands like to advertise with them.

The last is the Daily Mail which replaced a lot of the tabloid / gossip mag business not just in the UK but across the US and the rest of the Anglo countries and works on an extreme economy of scale with digital ads and an optional extra gossip premium subscription and a very large social media presence. The globalization of celebrity culture and media was helpful here, as is Page Six and the National Enquirer making some strategic mistakes that allowed the DM to take marketshare.

—

Beyond them you have legacy big regional papers like the Chicago Tribune, WaPost, LA Times, SF Chronicle that mainly survive as passion projects of rich men willing to lose money for long periods of time, I don’t think any are consistently profitable.

The economics is relatively 'easy', but I'd caution that the costs are higher than you'd expect. Printing is a scale service, but shipping mostly isn't, and the point where you're spending more to ship something than to print it comes around 50-200 units depending on what service, quality, and printing type you're going for. And that's domestic; if you have to ship international, you're spending more on postage than on per-unit production day one.

((This, coincidentally, is why merch and collections get pushed so hard; after production and shipping costs are included, these things end up being the highest per-unit profit, even if the sales are seldom massive in total revenue.))

The business model is hard. Subscriptions can cover a lot, but as Substack demonstrates, there's little relationship between the quality of a writer, the utility or correctness of their output, and how many people actually subscribe. Having good access or technical chops help get an audience, but there's a tension where these are resources that can be 'spent': access gets devalued if you're not critical enough and gets pulled if you are critical, expertise invites followers-on and there's limits to the extent of domain knowledge.

Traditionally, having the information first helped, but in this era that's a lost cause. You can't beat twitter to be the first to the scene, only be the first person to realize something was important.

There's also a bit of a conflict between sales model and content:

  • Subscription works best with regular content drops and constant (and reliable!) production cycle, which typically pushes people to novelty or topical current-day events, which has the benefit where you have more consistent income, but also need to keep hitting that schedule, and both secular trends or a snafu can cost you a ton. That's workable for traditional news-and-reviews, cutting-edge research, or topical focuses.
  • Bulk sales favor 'timeless' content and you can eventually make a surprising amount from sales of your back catalogue or 'collections', but the competition is harder (literally everyone who published in this field ever), maintaining that back catalogue can be expensive or literally messy, and maintaining customers is a lot trickier while your revenue goes feast or famine. Great for art or fiction.
  • Sponsorship is the tricky option, where your product is a side effect of something else getting the real focus. That doesn't have to be conventional advertising: a lot of prints that make this work are loss leaders for businesses that need to show customers how to use their products, or coalitions showing why the entire class of product exists. It can also be direct advertising, with the caveat that unless your magazine is literally Architectural Digest or defense industry, you probably aren't getting any real money here. It works in some domains, and often better than 'traditional' sales or subscription for them - a lot of maker electronics stuff pivoted hard to it for a reason - but for a thousand-subscriber group, it's rarely going to be worth the time chasing the leads.

One very unintuitive thing is the sheer disconnect between the scope of your plausible sales audience and your plausible revenue. A periodical targeting hobbyist electronics seems like it should be able to print money on subscriptions alone, but there's a road paved with skulls: there's a million teachers who need your product and literally can't buy it for their use case, and your actual sales venue is people bored in a line at Microcenter on a shelf your small zine won't get on. The market cap, the 'success' stories and well-known cases, for scifi/fantasy review publishing, like Locus, have the sort of actual subscriber base that would disappoint a high school newspaper. You just can't do that market, period. On the flip side, there's been successful mags focused on (SFW!) niche-of-niche furry products that made great side gigs or whole one-person shops, because you can have ten thousand people show up at your table, wanting to spend money, over a weekend.

The genius move is magazines for kids. They make great gifts, and because the audience ages out of the focus range you can just reprint the same content on a cycle (a magazine targeting preschoolers can just keep printing the same 2 years of content to new groups of kids).

Sort of. Audience acquisition is very expensive, and kid magazines, by definition, constantly have acquisition costs. The Cricket model where kids graduate to new levels of content is not bad, but the market can only get so saturated. I doubt that even Cricket has yet reached a point of stable subscriptions.

Do they still have zoo books?

That's actually genius. No one wants to read. But people want to want to read. Ergo, the way to sell reading material is when it's a gift for someone else. Bonus points if its educational, since then it's not just a magazine, it's like a textbook which is more expensive.

We'll make one version targeting the aspirational Chinese/Indian parent, and another for woke white parents. Like Ranger Rick, but with gay penguins and stuff.

I assume that Highlights is still around?

This article (originally written in year 2014, but revised since then) lists a zillion possible reasons for the death of fan magazines ("zines").

One active magazine pays five cents per word to authors. I don't know whether that's low or high.

I do still see a little “zine” publication in the OSR RPG space. It’s more than a couple steps removed from its predecessors.

One more recent matter that's killed them off, and not listed on the FanLore, is the pivot to ISBN'd book and anthology sales on a less formal schedule. Between the Kindle market, print-on-demand services, convention sales venues, and increased shipping costs, the conventional business model stopped looking anywhere near as compelling.

Which is a pity, because what's left did lose something from it.

Yeah, it's clear the magazine industry as we know it is dead. And fiction magazines are the deadest of the dead. I'd propose that instead of paying authors, magazines charge them to appear. No doubt many do.

But dead things can have a second life. Kind of like how people might churn butter as a hobby or something.

I'm envisioning a magazine with lots of pictures and low information density that you can just casually thumb through. You can put it on your coffee table, and its a more genteel alternative to scrolling. People might want that sort of experience and it feels high status. Obviously you'll never get the subscription numbers that magazines used to get. Instead you keep costs low and hope for 10,000.

I'm envisioning a magazine with lots of pictures and low information density that you can just casually thumb through. You can put it on your coffee table, and its a more genteel alternative to scrolling. People might want that sort of experience and it feels high status.

So National Geographic, but with fewer words?

Sounds like a good idea. But instead of hiring rugged, good looking photojournalists to travel around with an expense account, seducing lonely housewives, we are just going to buy amateur photographs for like $100 a pop, maybe less.

I wonder if you could bulk license IG photos for less than that?

Anybody familiar with Systema? Looks like such a cool martial art.

Find some place ran by proper speznaz that has finished his training pre 1991. (or equivalents from other warsaw pact countries, but pre 1991 or at worst 1995 is paramount)). Ask him to teach you combat sambo. Then be ready to be tried for involuntarily manslaughter at least.

I would recommend BBJ or Judo if you're older than 30 as a hobby. Martial arts for self defense are overrated, and should be treated as a last, and absolute final solution only used after you've ran and are literally being fighting for your life.

Grappling is easier on your body long term, and sparring is more fun (personal preference obviously).

I agree with the other posters that MMA has pretty much won the sports category of martial arts, and a lot of these other martial arts can't compare, but also it's a lot rougher on your body to actually practice.

Totally agree. Unless you’re in fairly regular training and hard full resistance sparring alongside a fairly heavy training program, you’ll be more likely to get into trouble with “self defense” than to get out of it. Not because the arts are bad, but because they cannot cover things that are likely to happen (weapons, especially guns, multiple attackers, obstacles, fighting on concrete), and because again most people don’t train seriously enough to pull off their moves in an emergency situation against a fully prepared opponent. It mostly leads (especially for women) to people not being weary enough to avoid sketchy situations and not being aware enough to notice that Theres danger around. Women are probably better off knowing less because if they start thinking they know self defense, they’ll be more likely to stay out too late, or go to bad neighborhoods, or get too drunk in public. Then they end up in a situation where they’re alone trying to defend themselves from a guy who has 120 pounds on them using a technique they practiced one time at the YMCA in a class taught by a black belt guy who hasn’t been in tournaments in 5 years and has never been in an actual fight. It will obviously fail, and the woman will be pretty much screwed at that point.

I think (to your point) self-defense stuff is probably really good from the perspective of "learning how to take a hit" but no sane martial arts program will let you practice some of the most effective offensive moves (for instance, biting and snapping fingers - which I would guess are probably even more effective than the famed crotch grab, particularly if you're dealing with a rape attempt). I met a guy who was in the deeply unfortunate position of being in a grappling fight against someone with a gun once and he won by biting, which convinced his assailant that it was no longer worth continuing his wicked endeavors that day.

If you're actually in a self-defense scenario, you should be trying your darndest to cheat in a way that will plausibly cripple someone. I don't train for this sort of thing, but if I did I'd hope that if I ever had to actually do something (in a self-defense situation specifically) I wouldn't let my wicked right hook or whatever get in the way of something smarter.

It’s no so much that such “dangerous techniques don’t exist or could not in theory be pulled off. But if your “training” for a finger snap is never actually done full speed against an actual resisting opponent, you will not snap the fingers. And worse, you’ll probably end up doing something stupid in the attempt that puts you in danger or prevents your escape. Worse yet, the mistaken belief that I know how to defend myself means im much more likely to get into danger either through complacency (not leaving a bad situation quickly enough), or poor awareness (not noticing the danger until they’re ready to attack) or going to places that are known to be dangerous (bars in inner cities at 3am).

In your case, the wicked right hook is probably your best bet bet because you’ve spent the time and energy learning how to tag someone full force while they are actively working to prevent that. You are very likely to be able to right hook someone in an unorthodox place on their body, but that’s not a different technique, it’s a different application of a technique you’ve trained for hours a week.

But if your “training” for a finger snap is never actually done full speed against an actual resisting opponent, you will not snap the fingers.

I don't think you're wrong about the general principle, but I'm not sure about the specific example: I kinda refuse to believe that it's hard to actually break a finger. However it's not necessarily a move that you will have much chance to employ unless someone puts their hands on you in a convenient way.

To extend the idea of what I am talking about a bit further - you cannot train in full speed against an actual resisting opponent to shoot them. But given the option, you generally you should shoot them instead of punching them, even if you have more realistic training experience punching people.

To your point here:

You are very likely to be able to right hook someone in an unorthodox place on their body, but that’s not a different technique, it’s a different application of a technique you’ve trained for hours a week.

I very much agree (and that's how training to shoot works, too).

Paintball is exactly an opponent resisting being shot fwiw

I've done airsoft and greatly enjoyed it. Wish I could find a paintball or airsoft place close by.

As Crowstep mentionned, if your goal is min-maxxing fighting ability, then the answer is simple: MMA. Because if anything was found to be better than MMA, it would get integrated into MMA. But you might have a preference for sports, aesthetic, or for something that suits your body better for any reason, that's fine. Whatever the martial art, what matters most is that it trains with relatively free-form sparring against a resisting opponent. Martial arts with a significant sport scene tend to be better about this than most. Be wary of any school that doesn't spar or spars only with and against a heavily restricted moveset, because their techniques are "too deadly". Even if you are maximally charitable and assume that the technique was actually very deadly and actually useful, if you have never practiced it in sparring against a resisting opponent you cannot rely on it in self-defense.

And the likelihood of the maximally charitable scenario is low; you can be certain that people who made a living from knowing how to fight for real in the past found a way to spar to keep their skills sharp and relevant. The traditional martial arts scene was, in the 20th century, invaded by countless frauds, as there are reasonable sounding arguments as to why someone who supposedly knows how to fight might not be able to demonstrate that they, indeed, know how to fight. By now, these countless charlatans have their own "lineage" behind them, so credentialism has failed in that space. A black belt means essentially nothing without knowing what getting it meant.

But for the specifics of Systema, it has a bad reputation. It used to claim it was special forces HaRdCoRe training, but after MMA basically called everyone's bullshit, it seems most Systema schools rebranded themselves as something more soft and semi-meditative like Aikido to avoid the embarassment of admitting how little what they teach is relevant to fighting.

Because if anything was found to be better than MMA, it would get integrated into MMA.

Are there any (effective) strategies that are banned on the basis of risking death or permanent injury? I'm pretty sure MMA has at least a few rules on sportsmanship that might lose in a true Thunderdome competition.

Oh, a bunch. Eye pokes are the big one, there are tons of circumstances where it's optimal to risk your fingers to threaten their eyes. Biting, gouging, small joint locks/breaks, attacking the throat, and using the clothing/hair round out the list. That's pretty much all of them though. If it isn't banned, and isn't done, you can kinda just assume it's not effective at scale. IE any head-kick that you're not already seeing generally doesn't pencil out the risk vs reward of a one shot knockout vs catching a nasty cross or overhand during your recovery.

The early ruleset I believe only restricted biting, gouging and strikes to the groin. These techniques are likely effective, but also don't exactly reflect on a martial arts' effectiveness much, you don't need to be a god of fighting to know how to kick someone in the nuts or that kicking someone in the nuts works. Most of those are also not game changers, in the sense that they are not going to nullify effective techniques. For instance, you can bite and gouge try to hit the groin of someone choking you out, but they're unlikely to get him to relax his choke, so the result is that you still lost the fight, he could have still killed you if he had wanted but also now he also has to get medical attention for a gnarly bite mark. Early MMA competitions allowed even stomping, and the result was still that martial sports dominated, usually in the order of how unrestricted their allowed moveset was (ie: taekwondo, with its moveset heavily restricted to encourage acrobatic kicks (high kicks, spinning kicks), would do poorly compared to muay thai, which allowed puches, kicks, knees elbows and clinching). The problem with strategies that are too dangerous to practice on resisting opponents is that if they exist, they still wouldn't be "useful" because what you haven't practiced in a realistic environment you cannot hope to use with adrenaline flowing when it actually matters. And in effect, they don't tend to be really much more effective than those you can actually practice.

For instance, yeah, I'm pretty sure someone giving me a full power strike to the throat would be effective. But so is a punch to the jaw, and boxers practice punches to the jaw against people constantly, as opposed to the "too deadly to spar" karate master who only does his throat strikes in the air. And defending against both of them is pretty similar, a boxer defending himself from punches to jaw is not leaving his throat an exposed target either.

So tl;dr: In theory yes, but having techniques too deadly for sparring or competition is essentially an unfalsifiable claim, which is extremely convenient for charlatans. And some of these charlatans are very convincing. Some might even believe themselves.

Martial arts is a solved problem. The optimal fighting style is MMA.

Any style that can't prove itself in the octagon isn't worth looking at, if your goal is to actually fight.

Goal is not to fight though, it's more about personal / spiritual development.

Wouldn't oriental martial arts serve better then, not the one marketed as the pragmatic spec ops killer system?

I'm Orthodox, oriental martial arts have problematic spiritual differences imo. Also, systema is not practical at all lol as far as I understand.

Surely that's not one style but rather a combination of wrestling, BJJ, muay thai, Western boxing, etc., with exact proportions depending on individual background and probably also baseline aptitude and preference.

Yeah that's probably a better way of putting it. In any case, any style that isn't intensely stress-tested on the mat/in the ring isn't worth bothering with. Judo may not be a huge part of MMA since the fighters don't wear clothing beyond shorts, but judoka do fight competitively (although there is definitely a groundfighting gap there that BJJ fills).

Hmeh. MMA does impose certain parameters that do not generalize. Like the octagon itself - flexible walls and a soft floor.

But I agree that competitive fighting is a good heuristic for detecting nonsense martial arts.

And it's one-on-one, and you can't grab your opponent by the clothing, and you have no shoes on and no stomping is allowed. All this means that grappling is generally more efficient in the octagon than it's in a real fight, where ending up on the ground is much more dangerous.

Although I should read more about the new meta now than 12-6 elbow strikes are legal again.

And I agree that competitive fighting is a good heuristic for detecting nonsense martial arts.

The restrictions cut both ways though. Getting lifted and slammed in the octagon is often a waste of energy for your opponent, on concrete, it can be immediate death. I'd agree that generally cuts against BJJ techniques that rely on holding guard, but there are some moves like a double ankle sweep that get a lot more powerful with a hard surface.

It is not quite that simple. MMA is the best in terms of actually learning how to fight, but the very elements that make it so good also means it carries a massive risk of injury compared to most other martial arts.

Traditional martial arts may well have a steeper initial learning curve while also having fewer useful things to teach. But a good Karate, Taekwondo, or Jujitsu club will still improve your fighting abilities compared to someone with no formal training.

So there is a real tradeoff in terms of risk and reward here. And that is before we get into people who practice martial arts mainly because it looks cool.

But a good Karate, Taekwondo, or Jujitsu club will still improve your fighting abilities compared to someone with no formal training.

I don't think that's right. Karate is basically worthless. Spending most of your time on kata and drills that have no correspondence to actual fighting, and then 'sparring' by playing what is essentially tag with your hands and feet. The same is true of Taekwondo (with a weird reluctance to use their fists). Brazilian jujitsu is absolutely valid, but the traditional Japanese kind is closer to aikido (the bullshittiest of bullshit martial arts) than anything that resembles fighting.

Not learning to fight while thinking you're learning to fight seems like a dangerous combination. Far better to practice the mystical ancient art of running away and phoning the police.

Anything that doesn't involve punching, kicking, grappling, throwing, pinning or submitting a resisting opponent is basically dancing. And if you're gonna learn to dance, at least make it a style with hotter girls like salsa.

But if learning to fight means risking injury, well yeah. Fighting is hurting the other guy. That's a pretty inescapable tradeoff.

Eh, basic kicks and strikes are pretty similar between styles and translate pretty well into MMA. Mastering those basics is supposed to be the mark of a black belt. Some traditional martial arts clubs also do full contact sparring, and some will occasionally host self defense courses led by a bouncer or police officer.

The katas and advanced techniques are generally useless in a fight, and any applicable benefit you get from those (strength, coordination, agility, etc.) can be also achieved through other sports. So at that point it is mostly down to personal preference.

But I would think that any dojo that does actual sparring would at least give some benefit, even if you spend a lot of time learning techniques which main purpose are to be technically impressive and look cool.

I don’t think anyone is saying that a punch isn’t just a punch. The problem is the training techniques used. If I learn to punch from a boxer, I will learn to punch against a physical target, I will very quickly be sparring full power against a moving opponent who is blocking and punching back. In most Karate dojos, you never punch another person full power until you have at least 3-6 months of training. Most training will be choreographed dances, punching the air, and performing very light single moves against an opponent who is told to block in a certain way and than punch back.

Karate is basically worthless.

Unless you're generational talent Georges St-Pierre.

Yeah, but that's kyokushin karate, ie: the one with all the madmen who do knockdown sparring all the time.

It has a wide reputation as bullshitto. I watched a few videos years ago where this older Russian guy touting Systema was dodging attacks and somehow debilitating his opponents without as much as touching them. "He was doing something I can't understand," said his opponents.

Unconvincing.

It's just another sambo flavor, isn't it?

Is hypoagency vs hyperagency the same phenomenon as what the fundamental attribution error describes?

The fundamental attribution error shows up in the ingroup/outgroup dichotomy in ways like:

Something bad happens --> (Ingroup: situational - something outside the person caused it) vs. (outgroup: dispositional - something inside the person caused it)

Something good happens --> (Ingroup: dispositional - something inside the person caused it) vs. (outgroup: situational - something outside the person caused it).

Something very similar seems to be at play when people are discussing hypoagency (the woman wasn't at fault for killing her own children) vs hyperagency (the husband should have done more).

Well, not quite.

The subject of the agency comparison is important; you have to use the same one or it doesn't work. So, hyperagency in this scenario would be "even though the woman wasn't at fault she accepts the blame anyway".

However, you are correct in noting that the ingroup/outgroup dichotomy does indeed generalize as "hypoagency for me, hyperagency for thee". (Compare "privatize gains, socialize losses"; the degree of deadweight loss created matches how untrue the lie is.)

So, "hypoagency for me" means "even though she was objectively at fault she [should never be expected to] take the blame", and "hyperagency for thee" would mean "even though he wasn't at fault he [should be expected to] accepts the blame anyway".

In other words, hypoagency/hyperagency is [within the person] a bias towards being too self-centered or too self-destructive, respectively. (Both are harmful insofar as they disrupt your ability to get an accurate picture of your surroundings.)

By contrast, the ingroup/outgroup one is self-centered when you're in the ingroup, and self-destructive when you're in the outgroup.

Yeah, more or less the same idea. A similar concept is internal vs. external locus of control. "Success has a thousand fathers, failure is an orphan".

Similar sounding, but actually different:

Internal vs external locus of control is about whether you perceive yourself to be in control of your own fate or outcomes. Do you self-perceive as a capable chooser or as driftwood (learned helplessness).

The other concepts are about perceiving, judging others.

I think they're closely related.

When they (or a member of their in-group) do something they shouldn't have, hypoagentic people perceive themselves as at the mercy of fate. They apply the same framing when a member of their out-group does something impressive or admirable ("well, I could've founded Amazon if I'd been born into a rich family like Bezos's").

Where it gets messy is that these people tend to flip the valence when it suits them: if a member of their in-group does something admirable, they want full credit for it, but any mistakes they made were due to factors outside of their control. Conversely, members of their out-group are blamed entirely for any mistakes they made, while admirable things they do are minimised as accidents of circumstance or attributed to factors beyond their control.

Most "hypoagentic" people are selectively so, using the framing to avoid their in-group receiving condemnation for mistakes (while still demanding full credit for impressive achievements). The Last Psychiatrist notes that this is a fundamentally unstable worldview.

Does anyone have experience, advice, or resources on dealing with aging parents? I’m dealing with it now. It sucks. Heartbreaking. And it’s tough to go from the person that listened to your parents to the person who has to tell them what to do.

Get them to list all their passwords on some kind of document. My aunt was the most organized person in the world but this was a big hiccup when she died

Secondhand advice from watching my mom go through this with her (extraordinarily selfish and unprepared) parents: get power of attorney before you need it. All the paperwork becomes a thousand times easier, which is especially appreciated when time-sensitive medical decisions need to be made. On that note, while morbid and uncomfortable, you need to get clear end-of-life instructions from your parents now. Force them to make the decision on when to pull the plug when everyone is thinking clearly so that you don't have to go through the trauma of having to decide whether your mom lives or dies on a random 4am in a strange hospital.

Also, be prepared to be mean and for you parents to spend the bulk of their last years angry and resentful toward you if they're naturally stubborn. Especially if dementia/alzheimers is a factor. They will revert into their worst childhood impulses and will not appreciate any of the effort you expend on their behalf. It helps if you mentally frame the new relationship as you repaying a kindness to your parents as you remember them in your heart. Like literally think of them as two separate couples. You're looking after old-them on behalf of young-them. That way you're not expecting gratitude from the current version (and growing resentful at its absence); you're simply returning the favor to the lovely people who raised you.

Also, be prepared to be mean and for you parents to spend the bulk of their last years angry and resentful toward you if they're naturally stubborn.

I'm so fucked, fuck

At least I'll repay the favor to my kids, I'm stubborn as hell (just like my mom!)

You show patience you didn't think you had, you empathize, and you just get through it. Any siblings? My own brother was basically useless and even counterproductive, but my female relatives were very helpful (and at times annoying but you take people as they are in such situations.)

I can recall very clearly feeding my dad with a plastic fork and telling him he had to swallow his macaroni (he had become dysphagic after what I believe was a stroke). Heartbreaking is the right word. It's not something I'd wish on anyone, though most of us will have to experience some form ir another of this. If your parent is in a hospital or care center or hospice much of the burden is relieved, though then of course there are other worries (are these people competent?) and so on. Relatives can really help though in ways that friends can't or don't. It's a reminder how important family is, and in particular the important role of nurturing (i.e. women.) YMMV I suppose.

How did Astrology become a Thing again? Since 2020, I've encountered it more and more IRL among the general population, even in people with undergrad degrees. I checked Tinder the other week before re-un-installing, and at least 1/3rd of the profiles had birth sign front-and-center. I honestly thought this was a slain beast.

Someone talking about capricorns really riles up my inner fedora.

Probably because people are too squeamish to examine sheep livers.

My future ex-wife got really into it around the same time she got into white-wellbeing / no-whiteguilt. Previously she hadn't even really read her horoscope in the newspaper paper but then suddenly paying for subscriptions and doing hers and Elon Musk's chart.

She is a Cancer.

She is a Cancer.

Pretty harsh judgement.

Something, something a crab crushed by Hercules.

Well, capricorns are the worst.

I'll just throw it out there that while I've looked into the actual data on astrology, which consistently seems to show no significant correlation with personality etc., I can't help but wonder if the right questions aren't being asked. At the very least I'd expect natal sunlight exposure, outdoor activity, etc. to correlate with something.

Then there's my personal experience which is that actually most people do behave as I'd expect based on their star signs. Confirmation bias? Very likely. Still uncanny though.

Oh yeah and then there was the time I happened to encounter an actual professional astrologer in a public place (let's say we were waiting in line for coffee) and struck up a conversation. After a few minutes of chatting I couldn't help but ask what she thought my sign was. She responded accurately and without hesitation, as though she'd made up her mind well before I asked and was sort of remembering it as an afterthought.

Epistemic status: Man, I don't know anything anymore.

If astrology was merely a "birth month as personality test" I'd have a lot less scorn for its practitioners. As you said, it makes sense that there'd be environmental factors that cause birth month to weakly correlate with certain personality traits. Ironically enough, people who are into astrology look down on that as fake newspaper horoscope astrology, and insist that you can only gain true insight by doing complicated star charts and whatnot. They tend to broadly reject the one element of astrology that might actually contain a hint of reality.

I can't help but wonder if the right questions aren't being asked. At the very least I'd expect natal sunlight exposure, outdoor activity, etc. to correlate with something.

Relative ages amonst school grade cohorts? I'd imagine people used to being several months older than their direct peers might show some correlation with something, for instance.

This is definitely a thing I remember reading about. I don't remember the details, but I'm pretty sure they do better academically and socially, which I think persists into adulthood and higher earning levels.

Hasn't hit Japan yet as far as I know, but here there are already enough charms, amulets, bracelets, talismans, and assorted other apotropaic tchotchkes spread about the shops, stalls, shrines, and genkans that people probably don't have much mental space to add in the heavens. Oh and blood type, can't forget that. Blood type interest seems much more female coded but the general vibe toward what I'd (as someone raised Christian) see as animistic superstition is general. Of course I recently heard of a Japanese woman mocking Catholicism as a bizarrely morbid cult that has the gall to hang its god's body out in the middle of the place of worship, so there's that.

Yes, among conservative Catholics- who tend to believe in galenic temperaments- women are much more into them than men. These have thé added bonus that you can just make up which one is yours to fluff yourself up, of course.

Catholicism as a bizarrely morbid cult

Reminds me of a joke about an unruly Jewish boy.

Reminds me of a joke about the pope in a lifeboat with Raquel Welch (Those aren't buoys...)

She has a point, Christianity is a spooky religion; you drink blood and the priests wear black and especially holy people bleed from their palms

CS Lewis made a point of discussing this in one of his works.

Paging @FlyingLionWithABook

Could be this bit, from a talk he gave on apologetics:

We may salva reverentia divide religions, as we do soups, into "thick" and "clear." By thick I mean those which have orgies and ecstasies and mysteries and local attachments: Africa is full of thick religions. By clear I mean those which are philosophical, ethical, and universalizing: Stoicism, Buddhism, and the Ethical Church are clear religions. Now if there is a true religion, it must be both thick and clear: for the true God must have made both the child and the man, both the savage and the citizen, both the head and the belly. And the only two religions that fulfill this condition are Hinduism and Christianity. But Hinduism fulfills it imperfectly. The clear religion of the Brahman hermit in the jungle and the thick religion of the neighboring temple go on side by side. The Brahman hermit doesn't bother about the temple prostitution nor the worshiper in the temple about the hermit's metaphysics. But Christianity really breaks down the middle wall of the partition. It takes a convert from Central Africa and tells him to obey an enlightened universalist ethic: it takes a twentieth-century academic prig like me and tells me to go fasting to a mystery, to drink the blood of the Lord. The savage convert has to be clear: I have to be thick. That is how one knows one has come to the real religion.

It provides a sense of certainty (and mastery) in an uncertain and chaotic world. This is psychologically palliative for women using dating apps, which involves much uncertainty and chaos. There is something to blame and learn in each encounter: his or my sign meant x or y; it didn’t work out so now I know not to talk to any Broncos born on this particular moon sign etc.

Also: it’s fun to read and do, it’s social, it’s low-stress.

A few factors imo, it's resurging for largely the same reasons leftism in general is popular.

People have a desperate, deep seated need to stand out from the crowd, to be exceptional or above average in some way. For those who don't have any obvious areas of talent or excellence, they have to get inventive. This is why people turn to ideology or controversial ideas. It is very, very alluring to claim that this thing which the majority of people (rightly!) dismiss is actually true and has value, and everyone else are idiots for not seeing it. It's an extremely easy way to set oneself apart and claim to have secret knowledge. This is as true for your traditional anti-vax moms as it is for astrology adherents as it is for reflexive leftists who argue that mass immigration is great, actually, as it is for Jehovah's who think they're part of the chosen few going to be saved. Everyone wants to be part of an exclusive crowd that are just better than the plebs. Believing and defending unpopular things is a low-to-no-cost way of achieving that. Your little clubhouse gets to shore up their egos by circlejerking and looking down on those "sheeple" who don't follow your chosen ideology.

Believing and defending unpopular things

But not really unpopular things, just low-risk things. You don't get fired from your job for talking about capricorns - though you could be if you talk about mass immigration in a wrong way.

Right, yes. "Safe edgy" but applied to political and personal opinions.

Isn't astrology fundamentally opposed to leftism because it denies the Blank Slate and asserts that the most important aspects of one's character are determined (dare I say "assigned") at birth?

Race is one of the most important aspects of one's character, according to the Left, and it is unchangeable, just ask Nkechi Amare Diallo. The logic is as much the subject to the ideology as anything else on the Left. That's how doublethink works.

No? “Fundamentally opposed” is the kind of framing you’d use for a doctrinal debate, and approximately nobody is trying to debate the proper role of astrology in politics. If you had a contingent of wine aunts trying to recognize the ascendance of Mercury in a DNC plank, then yeah, you’d see antiracists bring the knives out.

People like to measure every “leftist” against a central authority. Every category, really: I think this is an instance of Isolated Demands for Rigor. But most people don’t make every decision in alignment with their broader political lean. You’re better off thinking of astrology (or entertainment, or whatever social ritual…) as a separate magisterium from the question of how society ought to be organized.

Concepts are only sacred so far as they are useful; if it is more convenient to believe something else over blank slatism, then something else will be believed, at least for as long as it remains convenient to do so.

That would be approaching from a rational, or at least reasoned, perspective, whereas those who seem to embrace astrology also seem very much emotional and intuitive. The rational trappings about celestial positioning and whatnot are just embroidery, in my view. Like a Grimoire page 257 suggesting you need exactly three drops of virgin blood to cast the spell, or whatever. The exactitude is the sleight of hand to get you to buy into it as real, though fundamentally it's hookum. When confronted with your point here it isn't hard to imagine a bit of handwaving and scoffing that "that's not how it works," followed by a topic change.

Leftists aren't opposed to selectively applying their precious Blank Slate. Their favored groups are very much blank slates. Their disfavored, not so much.

Someone linked an article, "We Are Repaganising" in the culture war thread. I think this is another facet of this. With Christian condemnation of astrology neutered in broader society, pagan customs return.

Something needs to fill that God-shaped hole.

Makes sense to me. Without the larger structures, people pick and choose whatever idiosyncratic beliefs are most convenient. Reminds me of something a lapsed catholic atheist friend once said to me: "I may not believe in God, but you bet your ass I believe in Saint Anthony." Said in jest, but he was pathologically bad about losing his keys and other small items, and he really did say a prayer to St Anthony to help him find things. He was no longer Catholic, but he subconsciously held onto some seemingly random little things that remained instrumentallly useful to him.

I think the de Christianization of the west has made a lot of that stuff more acceptable to the general public. Although I don’t think I’d call our current zeitgeist repaganizing simply because I think our age at current is more nihilistic than pagan. Pagans while they were a bunch of vaguely indo European religious cults had some define beliefs about the world and definite notions of morality, anthropology, ecology, and metaphysics. Norse pagans had definite ideas about what being a good heathen meant. Romans had different, but equally strong ideas about the universe, the gods, morality, and so on. We have no ideas like that. We don’t have much of a conception about metaphysics, and the answers to most questions about morality tend to be “eh, believe whatever you want. The only universal evil is calling what someone wants to believe or do evil..”

Of course things like astrology would come back in those circumstances.

our age at current is more nihilistic than pagan

Yes, spot on. David Bentley Hart writes this up well here if one doesn't find his prose to squash one like a bug.

It’s a bit wordy, but I agree with the main thrust of his arguments. It’s just that I don’t think it’s just morality though. The idea of any kind of Truth as something that you are supposed to believe even in circles where it absolutely matters is pretty much gone. You don’t have to take any certain position on the origin of the universe, even in fairly conservative Christian circles. Creeds and formularies are barely taught. There are essentially maybe 3 groups that still insist on fundamental principles and creeds and concepts as a fundamental for belief: Islam, TLM Catholics, and Orthodox Christians. Other than that, it’s kind of a free market of ideas. If you read back into history, when the culture was still Christian at its root, you’d have all kinds of arguments about the right way to be a Christian. Not the preferred way. I remember reading a book called “The Great controversy” in which the author— who was Adventist, I believe — spent the entire book arguing that all other Christians were wrong and in danger of hell for not keeping the Sabbath. This wasn’t a statement of “well, I think, but im not going to say everyone else is. Wrong.” It was YOU ARE WRONG AND IF YOU DON’T CHANGE YOU ARE OUTSIDE OF THE FAITH. you can find other similar arguments made in the late Christian Western world where belief in evolution or denial of the Trinity or infant baptism were major, important beliefs that were required of the flock more or less.

I agree with the Benedict Option author. Most of the people who consider themselves Christian are Theraputic Deists, and they would have been considered heretics in most earlier eras. It’s denial by not caring in some sense. The reason you don’t care about the truth claims in many cases is that you don’t really believe in the exclusivity of the religion you claim.

It's interesting how different Russia and the US are, because it never went away here. Everyone knows their star sign (and often their Chinese animal as well, I am Sagittarius/Ox btw), most newspapers and magazines (other than explicitly business-oriented ones) have a horoscope section and every December the shops are flooded with the upcoming Chinese zodiac animal-themed calendars and knick-knacks.

However, interest in astrology, tarology and related crap has been dropping since 2024, likely because more people use LLMs instead of professional esoteric services.

I feel Russia got a bit tamer since 1990s with Alan Chumak, Kashpirovsky, and so on. At least now it's more mainstream, cross-cultural superstitions, not something on the verge (and sometimes over it) of mass hysteria.

Everybody here knows their star sign, but usually not their Chinese animal- although if you're male you probably don't know what it's supposed to mean. Interest in astrology doesn't seem to have ever gone away, either, although admitting to it might have been unfashionable in elite circles. Tarot and psychics and related crap is still for a) hardcore nuts and b) divorced women, though.

usually not their Chinese animal

Do chinese restaurants not have placemats with their zodiac on them in your locale? Every one-horse town in Canada has had such a place for a hundred years; sometimes the only decent restaurant around. It's something to talk about while waiting for your food, reading practice for kids, etc -- so I'd say most people here would know their Chinese animal. (which is bits I'm not going to release about myself)

A surprising amount don't, and just have gigantic menus you order off of by number. I've certainly seen them, but 'Chinese' is not the default restaurant meal in large parts of America either(Tex-Mex is), and lots of them are buffets or fast-casual places that don't have menus in that sense, and even sit down Chinese restaurants often skip it.

Monkey here. But I didn't know that pre Japan. I used to read a lot of Camille Paglia and I find her takes fascinating but her attachment to astrology was always weird. In your categories she's probably more hardcore nut, though she's also separated from her lady friend. To listen to her talk about starsigns with the same straight faced dogmatism and tachyphemic eloquence that she does with most everything else was an experience.

Women love those kinds of categorization things and take them way too seriously.

As compared to men and MBTI?

Do women actually take them seriously in the sense of believing them? All the women I've known that are into astrology/tarot/etc only take them seriously in the way "gamers" take video games seriously--they put in effort to do them well, but recognize it's just a form of social entertainment.

I see Twitter throwing a fit over AfD winning or almost winning in Germany. Can somebody please loop me in about the drama of it all?

AfD is the national-populist party in Germany, that is, they favor socially reactionary and economically redistributive policies. Germany has coalition governments at both federal and state levels, and all other parties have agreed on a "firewall" against AfD: no matter how much they win, they won't join their coalition. The biggest sin of AfD in their eyes is that it's openly tolerant of ethnonationalists all the way to "Hitler couldn't have done everything wrong".

Saxony-Anhalt is a state in former East Germany, which has a different approach to the legacy of the Third Reich, and AfD has just won a plurality of the votes there, almost a majority. What makes West Germans run like headless chicken is that BSW (a splinter Left party that favors economically redistributive and socially reactionary policies) is willing to enter into a coalition with them, threatening the integrity of the firewall.

Which, in my opinion, would be the best outcome. By being locked out of the government, populist parties like AfD are free to criticize the mainstream parties as much as they want, earning free points with the electorate. "We would show them, oh, we would show them how it's done, but they are afraid of our methods working and losing their popularity forever!" they keep on saying. Well, now they get a chance to show everyone how it's done in a single state; they run it into the ground without affecting the rest of the country, and their popularity craters. Or, suddenly thrust into the driver's seat, they self-moderate their populism and become much closer to other mainstream parties in actual policies, obviating the need for a firewall.

IMO the AfD can only lose. They didn't outright lose the election, good on them, apparently they managed to sway the voters. But the voters aren't their biggest problem. Now they need to wheel and deal in parliament to make things happen, with partners all of whom hate their guts and will do everything in their power to make them fail. And even if that were not the case, they would have to work against the strict resistence of all institutions public and private, of the federal government, of the EU, and of everyone else who gets to interfere. Regardless of how well they do in the election, they're set up for failure in any case, and will come out of it looking bad.

obviating the need for a firewall.

Doubt. The AfD has the black spot. They're the designated target that everyone can legitimately direct their hatred at. In the public consciousness, they inherit all the detestability of the OG Nazis. Associating with them is a surefire way to get unpersoned in polite society. If they moderate now, become closer to the mainstream, then all that will do is lose them their popular support since "not part of the mainstream" is pretty much all they have going for them. Thus weakened, any incentives to remove the firewall will be similarly weakened, and the AfD remains more valuable as the socially agreeable punching bag than as a coalition partner.

I think the bigger issue for the long-term trajectory of the AfD is that it, just as the populist-left-leaning parties, is riding a general wave of discontent with the current state of affairs for which immigration, the main thing that distinguishes it from its competitors, is just one aspect among others. That current state of affairs is over-determined though, so to speak, by factors that no party, even the AfD in a hypothetical win with a solid supermajority and no institutional resistance, can fix. For example, what is the AfD going to do about German demographics before the welfare state that a large majority of the population worships comes crashing down? In this particular regard, they're actually worse than the mainstream parties, their commitments with regards to e.g. pension spending are only ever so slightly less insane than those of the far-left parties. Or how will they spur competitiveness and cost reductions among the German industrial giants before China grinds them into dust?

There are plausible approaches to both these and the other problems Germany faces, but they're extremely unpopular because they either go against the direct self-interest of the voting population, a majority of which is retired or will be soon, or violate cultural dogmas that have been in the groundwater for so long that to directly reveal their falseness is akin to heresy. The AfD deserves credit for being a large part of why one of those dogmas, the one around migration, has started to dissolve, but they're IMO just as blind as the mainstream parties on many others.

No to defend Merz or anything, but this general idea applies to him as well. He has the bad luck to be the face of government at a time when historical trends that he personally has little to do with have finally come to a head and have begun to enforce themselves on political reality. No doubt his constant gaffes and affinity for offending every single interest group is fairly unique, but I feel like everyone, especially far-rightists and -leftists who seem to particularly hate him, uses him as an easy scapegoat to avoid thinking too hard about the fact that their personal political program would probably fail just as hard, given the material and more importantly cultural constraints he has to work under.

I fully agree with your assessment.

Just one quibble: I don't think the AfD failing to fix the country's actual issues will be held against the AfD any more than the current government's attempts to fix some of the symptoms will be held in the current government's favor. Voters don't respect work on fundamentals. Voters go for vibes and handouts.

Now they need to wheel and deal in parliament to make things happen

What's the sort of thing that they could (theoretically) make happen on the state level, by the way?

There's a handful of things that are actually still up to the states in this heavily centralized pseudo-federation:

  • Education: Replace leftist propaganda with rightist.
  • Policing: Attempt to more strictly enforce laws against immigrants and leftists.
  • Culture: Defund leftist projects. Possibly try to build pro-German ones.
  • Local Affairs: Block lefist initiatives, and maybe help along prosocial ones where they can.

And there's a good bit of culture warring to be done in all of those. But as with everything in Germany, it's all secured by lightyears of red tape, so what little they can do there will take disproportionate amounts of effort and time, and always against the resistance of the establishment in each of those areas, and is likely to be swiftly undone by the next government that actually has the deep state on its side.

As for the big issue, immigration, they can't really do much. Maybe redirect some immigrants to other states, maybe inconvenience immigrants here and there, but ultimately the incentive structures are created at the federal level and the enforcement failures are at the EU level. Sachsen-Anhalt, being a Binnenstaat, isn't even at the German borders.

Question because I legitimately don't know- is the AFD likely to have access to the human capital to start doing any of this stuff? That's been a problem for controversial right wing governments in very established, procedurally suffocating countries. Germany's cordon sanitaire has seemed unusually effective until now.

The AfD, by necessity, selects for people who burn social bridges and their future prospects in order to pursue their political visions. That, contrarians and attention whores. In other words, not the smartest, and not the most numerous. It's one thing to vote for the AfD anonymously, and another entirely to wear their colors in public and signal to everyone that you are a detestable nazi and actively working to bring about the second coming of the third Reich.

To be exact, that is my impression as a southwesterner. But we are an intensely anti-AfD corner of the country, and the current debates revolve around Sachsen-Anhalt, which is a very different place.

So, in short: I expect them to have serious human capital shortages based on what I know, but what I know has blind spots.

I am asking you because I know you're German:

How do people typically explain why East Germany today is seen as the most supportive of right wing politics in Germany? My imagination is that East Germans, having been communist in the past, would remain more left wing after integration with the rest of Germany, but that seems not to be the case. Is it because the East Germans have experienced communism and reject it, in a similar way to how Cubans in Florida often reject communism? If so, does the rest of Germany not have any instinct to trust the East German experience with their recent past of communism? Or is it because German politics are too different from American/anglo politics and left/right and communist/capitalist are too tenuously linked in the context of Germany today that I may be projecting dynamics onto the situation that are not correct?

The usual narratives are:

  • Western denazification was more effective.
  • The GDR discredited leftism.
  • They're just voting that way out of protest against their worse material conditions.
  • Capitalism has eroded the Western social fabric and the East Germans retain a more pragmatic worldview.

IMO all are correct to some extent. The East German socialist project really has done more to discredit leftism than to promote antifascism, whereas leftism in the West never had to take responsibility for real-world outcomes while also becoming ever better at propaganda. Westerners really do have it cushier, and East Germans do have more to complain about, and it's up to taste whether their protest voting is legitimate. And finally, Westerners really are "oversocialized", and East Germans remain better able to point out that the emperor is naked - even though they in turn buy into completely different weird conspiracy theories.

More comments

No, not really. Think Trump 2: they have loyal people, but they don't have competent people.

Trump 1 was like a theoretical AfD/CxU coalition: most positions are filled with blacks willing to work with blues in theory, but failing to meet their expectations in practice.

Or, suddenly thrust into the driver's seat, they self-moderate their populism

What do you think they would need to moderate to become more functional? There was a time when the mainstream had a credible claim on just being normal, and populists could be portrayed as whipping up greviances to grift their way to power, but these days are long over. Nowadays it's populism that's based on just being normal, and the mainstream that needs to be forced to moderate through the threat of populists taking power.

As I understand, AfD is the only non-woke, non-pro-civilizational-destruction party in Germany, and the only one with chances of winning something in Western Europe in general. Which of course makes them literally Hitler, as anything that threatens woke powers is. Every single Republican candidate has been literally Hitler since literally Hitler, and every non-woke European party will get the same treatment. Especially one that has any chances of winning any votes. This is just how it works.

That said, it's only one state, and they didn't even get the majority - they are the largest party, but only 39 out of 83 seats. I am not sure what could they do with such setup - likely, a lot of heat but not sure anything could change. Most of Germany's problem will need federal policy change, as I understand, and a plurality in one state does nothing.

Minor quibble- Italy's actually governed by the Fratelli d'Italia, FN will probably win the next French elections, and Spain may well have a right-populist government in the near future. And who even knows UK politics.

Spain may well have a right-populist government in the near future

We'll see. It doesn't yet. If that happens, I'll be happy, the current state of Spain is extremely sad.

Every single Republican candidate has been literally Hitler since literally Hitler,

Was Eisenhower ever accused of this? His, uh, "punching Nazis" bona fides are effectively unquestionable. I'd buy it for every other one, though.

Looks like you are right, while Dewey has been compared to Hitler all the time, with Eisenhower it was more like "he is a great man but since he's a Republican, he's still a captive of the right wing, who as we all know are literally you know who, so..." But yes, Eisenhower is an exception, but both before and after him everybody has been.

From Grok: From communists and the far left: This is where associations with fascism occasionally appeared. East German Communist leader Wilhelm Pieck in September 1952 attacked Eisenhower’s call for a “crusade against communism” (in a speech to the American Legion) as repeating “the program devised by Adolf Hitler” and using “the language of Hitler and Goebbels.” U.S. Communist Party materials from the period sometimes warned that the Eisenhower administration represented a “sharpened war and fascist danger,” linked McCarthyism and anti-communist policies to fascist tendencies, or framed the Republican victory as heightening fascist risks.

So yeah, same same. The center libs were too circumspect to accuse Eisenhower of fascism directly, but the far left wasn't.

I'll go further and say neither you nor I will ever see a Republican candidate for important office anywhere, ever, who isn't called a Nazi/Fascist/Hitler. Nor will we ever see such a candidate fail to garner some vague rape claims, often by large numbers of anonymous women. The only question is how far toward the center believing such things extends.

Nor will we ever see such a candidate fail to garner some vague rape claims, often by large numbers of anonymous women.

One exception on this point: Romney.

Pre-Trump, pre-Me Too, back when the Dems controlled all messaging and could win an election based on lying about someone's taxes rather than their rape record.

I suppose you're probably right on a literal level here, but it seems like there needs to be some level of notoriety to the claims, or it's almost trivially true of any public figure. It's probably true for every member of Congress. It might be true for most city council persons nationwide, even.

"We called every Republican a Nazi and Hitler Hisself for a century, but Eisenhower was a difficult lift because he just kinda....beat Hitler and Nazism so we left that particular slander to our pet commies" isn't the defense of establishment liberalism you want to pin your hat on.

Ken Paxton doesn't seem to be accused of any of this stuff- he's receiving perfectly accurate accusations(that he's an adulterer who takes bribes) instead.

Ken Paxton isn't a nationally important race, he has other baggage, and it's Texas. If he were up for the presidency, he'd be Hitler Hisself. Nearly all politicians are adulterers who take bribes, you might as well call just him a politician.

Ken Paxton isn't a nationally important race,

How do you feel about Talarico's chances? It'd be nationally important if the Republicans lose control of the Senate by a losing seat in Texas, of all places. Paxton's odds feel much worse than Cornyn's would have been, and the decision to primary a long-time incumbent with someone of Paxton's, uh, moral character seems at least a potential own-goal.

I don't know enough about state politics there to have a good opinion. Single party states are always wildly corrupt and it damages the party in power. Talarico strikes me as deeply weird with a raft of opinions that would make him absolutely toxic to anyone with real religion, plus a carpetbagging "How do you do fellow Bar-B-Q enjoyers?" that seems very inauthentic as a presentation. I don't trust polling to be within forty points of the election. I don't trust someone of Paxton's "moral character" to not have some dodgy electioneering strategy. Uneducated guess, Talarico goes the way of Beto and we never hear from him again. Paxton is indicted a few years after winning.

I would give a slim edge to Paxton. If democrats are going to win a statewide race in Texas, it will be this one. But they haven’t done that in 40 years. Talarico’s, uh, controversial statements are just now starting to air, and we don’t know how voters will weight them versus Ken Paxton’s history of corruption.

But they haven’t done that in 40 years.

Ann Richards won the 1990 governor election, which isn't quite 40 years ago, and there were a few other statewide offices through the mid 90s that Democrats won. Texas hasn't been a red state, much less a very red one, as long as most people seem to think.

This is what I was thinking, but I'm sure someone at the Texas Tribune has called him a fascist or whatever.

Honestly, that's half the problem with mass social media. Claims like "never see X that isn't called Y" just don't mean what they used to.

"Die a corrupt adulterer or live long enough to become Hitler?"

The normal corruption is easier and thus a more common tone, but it's still present.

And the local AfD leader says he wants either the absolute majority or to repeat the elections, but no compromises.

Ah well. Salvini again.

I mean, if there's no party they could ally with that would allow them to do anything meaningful - which seems to be the case right now - then what's the point of forming a coalition which would continue more of the same and prove AfD is as incapable of delivering on their promises as everybody else? At least staying outside allows them not to accept responsibility for the shit that's happening, once they are nominally in power, the responsibility is theirs, and will be used against them next time when nothing changes.

Yeah. I'm not saying he's wrong to insist; I'm saying it's gamble that's likely to result in defeat and irrelevance. There is no winning move.

They should really hammer on the immigration issue. That is their winning card. And yet no one was talking about it. People in Europe really want some foreigners gone.

Also Salvini got to power.

They should really hammer on the immigration issue. That is their winning card. And yet no one was talking about it. People in Europe really want some foreigners gone.

It's almost illegal to talk about it. Say the wrong words and your entire party gets blasted as unconstitutional.

Also Salvini got to power.

And gave it up because he refused to compromise, certain that a fresh election would get him the free hand he desired instead.

And then he was gone.

OTOH, the AfD, widely regarded as either the second coming of the NSDAP or as the only pro-German party in Germany, stands to win a state election for the first time.

OTOH, they can only lose. Either they don't get the absolute majority and will be cockblocked in parliament, or they will get it and be cockblocked by the deep state.

Disregard the hissyfits; as @ToaKraka points out, one might wish for the AfD to be what its detractors claim it is, but in the end this is all just hot air on all sides.

Article from right-wing commentator

The lunatic progressive-left Amadeu Antonio Foundation has formulated a horror scenario of all the deeply troubling and antidemocratic things the voters of Sachsen-Anhalt may be on the verge of enabling, which I am happy to present to you via the breathless histrionics of The Atlantic:

Imagine that it’s October 2026, and one of Germany’s 16 federal states has come under the control of a far-right government for the first time since the Nazi era. With an absolute majority in the state Parliament and one of its own installed as state premier, the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, quickly begins implementing its agenda. The interior minister announces an emergency remigration program: abolishing asylum, revoking the residence permit of any foreigner convicted of a crime, pledging to review all naturalization decisions made during this century, and incarcerating those designated for deportation. The government stops classifying Ukrainians as war refugees and ends their social benefits. European Union flags disappear from public buildings. The mainstream press is shunned in favor of influencers aligned with the party’s ideology. The government authorizes vigilante groups to act as an auxiliary police force in regions with high crime rates.

You could be forgiven for wondering whether the Amadeu Antonio Foundation is running some kind of deep-cover pro-AfD campaign. All mainstream press coverage, activist whining and cartel-party rhetoric seems dedicated to the singular goal of constructing the AfD as a genuine alternative to the present dysfunctional political order of the Federal Republic. The enemies of the AfD want nothing more than to convince voters that the party will prove powerful and effective if given access to the levers of power. They will remigrate the migrants, fold up the rainbow flags and restore order. “Please don’t vote for the AfD, they might well just fix something.”

…

The possibilities that await us tomorrow are therefore these:

(1) A three-party Landtag, with SPD and Greens both failing to get more than 5% of the vote. In this case, there is no doubt that the AfD will have a clear majority of Landtag seats and that Ulrich Siegmund will be the next Minister President Sachsen-Anhalt.

(2) A four-party Landtag, with SPD scraping in but the Greens falling short. In this case, the AfD will need to outperform the polls just slightly and capture 43% or more of the vote. This is conceivable but it will be close.

(3) A five-party Landtag, with SPD and Greens both achieving representation. In this case, the AfD will almost certainly not win the vote share necessary for a parliamentary majority.

Biology as a subject has never been my forte. In high school, I mistakenly took the advice of the majority of people in the grade above mine and opted for biology over physics. Though physics may be more mentally demanding, I appreciate its formulaic nature. Due to my executive dysfunction, I never managed to get biological concepts to fully click in my mind, as much of the learning process felt like rote memorization of Latin-derived jargon I saw no way of applying into my everyday life. I wish to retake my biology exam in November as a private candidate and find a way to get the content to resonate with me. Any actionable advice or resources one could point me to?

LLMs are excellent for recommending textbooks or other study material.

Also, if you do have reliable reference material in hand, you can ask the LLM about topics within it and have something to double-check to make sure the clanker isn't just hallucinating. It can be more effective than reading the references straight through, depending on your learning style and how the material is written.

Which concepts tend to get you confused? Cell biology, the complicated biochem stuff, Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium, Punnet squares?

I honestly believe I have knowledge gaps in just about every one of them bar ecosystems and Punnett squares. Gene expression, neurons, enzymes, blood transport, respiratory and gas exchange come to mind.

How are you with the sciences generally?

My prowess in natural sciences is for all intents and purposes nonexistent, I have always been more humanities-oriented.

And how are you at understanding technobabble on shows like Star Trek or Stargate?

I don't watch those particular shows but usually that isn't challenging, it's answering open-ended questions and having to delineate specific processes in choronological order that eludes me.

I should have loved biology

So, what are you reading?

I'm going through al-Ghazali's Arrangement of the Litanies. So far it is surprisingly interesting, given that I thought the practical aspects of worship would be boring for a non-Muslim. Backlog has been stuck for a while.

Baldree's Legends and Lattes series.

Mixed feelings on it. It's very fanfic-tier, of the literally 'what if the adventurer retired and worked in a coffee shop' sense, which is what I was looking for, and in contrast to a lot of fanfic there's both a genuine grabber and a central plot arc instead of people just waffing at each other. But it's also painfully woke. I can deal with stories where I don't agree with the politics. It's annoying when it gets in the way of the rising tension, though.

Boiling your deuteragonist's backstory down to 'was discriminated against' might save us time, fair. When it's everybody's backstory, it's not really shorthand, anymore. When a threat hanging over the protagonist is defused as soon as you stop interacting with their human male flunkies and find out that she's an older woman, it's become self-parody.

Which is a pity, because there's a stronger story buried just a few steps deeper, and at points Baldree stumbles into it. What are the logistics of a new business, how does the Rules For Rulers concept apply at small locales and small gangs, what are the fantasy world ramifications of 'adventurer' being an actual job, what ramifications does retired adventurer bring, when they show up and get explored they're done well. Even the lesbian romance has tension to it, even if it's not my cup of tea. But then you get back to progress as its own byword and luck magic, and the tension just deflates again..

But it's also painfully woke

Yeah I just don't have time for that stuff any more. There are plenty of good books.

Just finished Isles of the Emberdark by Sanderson. I'm not a big Sanderson fan, but new girl is and I'm trying to give him another shot. This one was very entertaining; I couldn't put it down, but it was also terribly written. Cringe, repetitive descriptions and dialogue, one dimensional characters, and chock full of millennial humor. I loved the plot and world building though, so think I will be diving back in for more Sanderson, probably in Spanish so I don't have to deal with how terrible of a writer he is on a sentence by sentence level.

Also reading State and Revolution by Lenin for philosophy book club. In contrast to Marx, who I found to be interesting and insightful, Lenin comes off as an idealistic and dogmatic blowhard. The closest analogy I can think of outside of leftist spaces is Saint Augustine and other early Christian writers versus the Bible (with the Bible being Marx for Lenin). Lenin's polemics against Kautsky reminded me a lot of Augustine railing on Origen: they both have very strong opinions without a lot to back them up, both in terms of logic and in terms of what their gospel truth actually says.

I finished Penance. As I predicted, of the three female murderers, the third is also revealed to have been sexually abused as a child, meaning two of the three were definitely sexually abused as children by male adults, and the third may have been too (she's established to have been acquainted, via her father, with the universe's equivalent of Jimmy Savile). For those keeping score, of the female murderers in Clark's first two novels, 100% were either definitely or probably sexually abused as children or teenagers by adult male guardians.

The novel frustrated me more and more as it went along. When it works, it really works, with spot-on portrayals of the dynamics of friendship groups among teenage girls and the dark sides of Tumblr fandom culture. But there are so many pointless and irrelevant digressions that add nothing and go nowhere. For instance, one of the murderers is established to be an avid fan of two American school shooters, whose murder spree is a mish-mash of the Chardon high school shooting and Columbine (I vaguely recall Scott stating that the former case is what persuaded him that capital punishment has its uses). She writes creepy fanfiction about one of the killers, clearly projecting her own psychological issues onto him. Fine. But right at the climax of the book, Clark devotes several dozen pages to describing how this school shooting went down, in a town several thousand miles from the main action of the story, populated with characters we don't know. What's the point of this? What does it add to the story?

Then right at the end, it's revealed that the in-universe author of the true crime book we have ostensibly been reading up to this point may have embellished or invented some details about the events of the story. This was clearly intended as a postmodern "how much of what you've read is true???" moment, but by that point I didn't care. Whatever the in-universe "truth" of the story, I know that Clark thinks that the only reason a female person might murder someone is because they were sexually abused as a child. Beyond that, I don't think I need to know much else.

It's a curious example of a patched together from the headlines story. As mentioned above, one minor character is a transparent stand-in for Jimmy Savile, and one of the characters is obsessed with a fictional school shooting modelled on two real cases. Numerous other infamous true crime cases are referred to under their actual names as well. It was only after I finished it that I discovered the actual murder with which the A-plot is concerned was itself modelled on a real case which took place in Indiana in the nineties.

On to The Best Minds by Jonathan Rosen. It's rather a slow read, but Rosen has a great eye for detail and his prose is stylish enough that it's not a chore to get through. Rosen was childhood friends with Michael Laudor, a legal genius who sadly suffered from schizophrenia, but who was able to flourish in academia with the aid of various accommodations. For a long time he looked like a prime example of how a mentally ill person could triumph over his disabilities, to the point that Brad Pitt and Ron Howard were looking to make an inspirational biopic about him (a project which eventually became A Beautiful Mind), right up until Laudor stabbed his pregnant girlfriend to death in a fit of paranoia. At the point I'm at in the book now, Rosen is just describing his childhood and adolesence and how he came to know Laudor.

Well, I mean an abusive childhood background is pretty textbook for any kind of serial killer or spree killer. Getting three for three might be a bit rote but it’s not unrealistic. I’ve never read the book though.

I made the argument at greater length in my latest Substack post. I find it interesting that Clark only feels the need to explain villainous behaviour as the product of childhood trauma when the perpetrator is female. The male perpetrators in her books never get any such pat explanations.

Sword of the Lictor by Gene Wolfe. I originally bounced off Book of the New Sun several years ago, stopping at the jarring disconnect that happens between Shadows and Claw. But i finally got around to reading it again, this time I have made it to Sword.

These books remind me of a quote from Les Grossman’s Magicians where Dean Fog remarks “I’m powerful enough to discern that I am stuck in a time loop but not powerful enough to do anything about it”

It’s the same here. I’m a smart, and discerning enough reader of complex philosophical fiction to be able to discern some of the layers going on, but also to understand that I am missing a large amount of the subtextual narrative that’s actually going on, and it is an extremely irritating feeling. I feel like I need a PhD in literature to make sense of this book on a first read. I know that most fans reread this series but I have never had to reread anything. Add to the fact that I can’t just casually read this and it compounds my annoyance.

Don’t get me wrong i love the series. That part of my mind that loves complicated abstractions and theorizing about hidden connections just eats it up. However i just sigh every time some other piece of literature gets brought in the book because now i need to pay super close attention lest i miss that the corn maidens are actually a mythologized parable for how to harvest energy from a black hole.

That's Gene Wolfe for you! I read a collection of his short stories in my late teens and it melted my brain (in a good way). I could just about recognise that there were a ton of things going on that I wasn't getting.

Re-reading really does repay, because there will be parts where you go "Argh! That is what was going on? You fooled me, Mr. Wolfe, you genuinely had me going there".

I know that most fans reread this series but I have never had to reread anything.

It's one of the series that really makes for an enjoyable rereading, especially after you finish all five books. You get to notice lots of hidden stuff, plus the prose is delightful, so it's not a chore.

Severian is a clueless guy walking an Earth encrusted with the stories and dust of a billion years of human civilization. He's got no idea what's going on under the surface, and neither do you.

Yes, but is the novel written by Severian as the events are happening in his clueless state? The narrator makes many choices about what and how to relate.

The novel is written by Severian as a memoir, but he never figures out all the answers before he writes the memoir.

Currently reading The Salt Fix by Dr. James DiNicolantonio, because I got curious about whether I am or am not eating too much salt. Hoping to come out of reading it with some clue how to get an idea of whether I am eating too much, not enough, or an okay amount of salt. My attempts to get some idea about this from other sources has not been going very well so far, other than to make me think, eh it's probably fine.

Mother of Learning. I'm 40% into Arc 2, and I'm starting to dislike it. Arc 1 had some actual (though flat) characters and plot development, and while I can accept the necessity of some downtime in a story, Zorian has been grinding his skills and marking down high-level sidequests to be done later for too damn long. Domagoj's taken "progression fantasy" too literally.

It's like Groundhog Day, but you have to watch Phil Connors painstakingly learn the piano and chainsaw carving and the rest of the stuff he needs to win Rita's heart.

upd: Okay, just as I wrote this, the protagonist finally returned to the city, and the plot is slowly moving forward again. I guess I'll see how much plot steam there's left.

The progression details never got me to "starting to dislike it" territory, but I do agree that they were the parts of the story I least enjoyed. They felt like they were killing the pacing and my interest.

I can't call them "the worst" or even "my least favorite" parts of the story, though, because when my son read it he ate most of that stuff up, and "repetition is the mother of learning" is exactly the mantra that smart lazy people need drilled into us.

I don't know if the book actually reinforces the idea that "repetition is the mother of learning" well. Zorian has spent around four years in the time loop. Let's make it equivalent to eight years of regular learning, since he has an inherent motivation to study twice as hard. Minus two years to complete the basic education (he's a third-year student), that makes six years. Or three master's degrees. And yet he's already an extremely dangerous magical ninja: a mind mage, an alchemist, an artificer and a battlemage in one. And a few more subclasses sprinkled in for good measure.

The real advice that the book is giving to smart lazy people is "spread your attention as wide as you can, it's not too hard to become better than average at everything if you're good at learning, when you have a massive toolset, you only have to find the right tool to solve any problem; deeply specialize only in the things you're unnaturally good at". Sure, there are some sentences about shaping exercises and regularly casting magic missiles sprinkled in, but so far, he hasn't defeated anyone because he's been practicing one kick 10000 times. On the contrary, it's because he has learned 10000 kicks.

I liked the slow burn, but the later portions definitely get more exciting and I thought the climax was very good.

What chapter name?

Gah, I don't remember them. I went to bed when he started the second loop in the magic academy city after a long break and met the cat shifter lady for the second time.

Currently working on Project Mars by Wernher von Braun. It's some of the driest science fiction I've read, with essentially no new science or engineering but filled with such an abundance of detail and explanatory calculations, it's obvious this was something he viewed as a serious proposal.

I wonder if he was a fan of Jules Verne.

ETA: According to AI inquiry, he was indeed well documented to be a massive fan, and considered Verne to be a foundational influence on his life.


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