domain:alakasa.substack.com
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
5m ago
Wouldn't one expect a cabinet secretary to normally speak, at least to some degree, with the voice and the authority of the President? Different in that way from legislators (or someone lower in the departmental totem pole, like Brinton).
faceh
6m ago
This thread is full of people saying that tattoos aren't attractive.
Not quite.
Its more that they're correlated with low social status in the larger scheme. This doesn't mean they isn't a local maxima where they make someone more attractive than they would otherwise be, even if it also makes them vastly less attractive to a certain segment of the population.
In fact, I've said it straight up that the 'cheat code' to getting more women interested in you is get tattoos, get subversive piercings and buy a motorcycle. This can lead to other negative effects, but the tradeoffs may be worth it! At least in the short term.
There's a dearth of people who hold positions of true wealth power who have tattoos, though. Thus, they remain a reliable class signifier.
When something is largely a lower-class phenomenon, just like enjoying MMA or light beer, the fact that a few upper class folks indulge doesn't really prove otherwise.
yet every cop and every Navy SEAL and every BJJ champ and every boxer I know has at least one tattoo visible in short sleeves.
Yes, which might explain why people who AREN'T tough want to mimic a signal that makes them seem tough, whether they are or are not. That's common enough in nature.
And if they do so, that degrades the strength of the signal. And makes counter-signalling more viable. If all the cops, SEALs and BJJ guys have tattoos, what might you surmise about the ones that have resisted the trend and don't have any?
I dunno, it reads like a social trend like any other. I lived through the era of tramp stamps, and those faded from popularity. I've seen dozens of fashion trends come and go. The only trick with tattoos is they're more costly to alter or remove.
Also, add in that there is researching indicating they can lead to health issues.
Jiro
8m ago
Beards can be shaved off, so they aren't indicators of low time preference like tattoos are.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
15m ago
What is your excuse for why China is able to do it while having a one standard deviation higher median IQ over America?
They likely don't; all those rural laborers don't show up in the IQ stats because they don't take the tests.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
20m ago
requires non-free or at least desperate labor to get done in sufficient quantities
What is your excuse for why China is able to do it while having a one standard deviation higher median IQ over America? Even Japan does not utilize as many foreign laborers as America.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
21m ago
In the 2016 and 2020 elections, white non-evangelicals with college degrees and even white non-evangelicals without college degrees supported Biden by a wide margin
The arbitrary filtering of one of the largest religious groups is silly. The shift to D is mostly among women, not the men. If you’re like me, and think politics should be reserved for the male-brained, women shifting D after a media propaganda blitz that utilized emotional propaganda about victimhood is not at all persuasive in regards to any trend that matters.
less than 50% of Republicans are now in favor of decreasing immigration, down from 88% last year.
This question doesn’t tell us anything, because it is in regards to the “present level of immigration”, under Trump who has been (at least presenting himself as) deporting illegals. The average has no idea that the country plans to import so many Indians. The average voter has no idea about the statistics related to yearly immigration, like, at all. You’re asking them about vibes. Shame on Gallop here.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
23m ago
The truth is "American don't want to do those jobs for those wages" and that is what this is (and has always been) about, wages.The Plantation owners don't want to pay the help, and once again the Democrats (who have always been the Party of the Plantation Owners) are once again threating civil war if they are not allowed to continue importing and exploiting thier non-citizen underclass.
Whenever committed ideological conservatives* hear about a minimum wage worker complaining about his low wage, they talk about productivity and demand curves and all that jazz. But mention that the worker is an illegal immigrant and all that logic goes out the window and he starts sounding like Bernie Sanders saying that the employer has infinite resources (to pay an American, not the illegal) and that only malevolence and greed stops the lowest-paid workers from getting 65$ an hour.
And even if the government could arbitrarily order wages to increase, why not order wages to increase for the better and cushier jobs Americans are more likely to do? Seems to me like it's a weird fantasy where Americans are supposed to work Bangladesh-level jobs (crop picking, textile sewing, etc) but get American wages for it because I guess the Bengali government is too stupid to just order wages to increase.
Also, most farmers vote Republican and the CSA constitution forbade the international slave trade.
*Not to be confused with normie GOP voters
quiet_NaN
26m ago
I agree that fronting the supply to drug dealers is logical.
I was working from the assumption that the victim was a mere consumer though, and extending credit to drug consumers seems extremely bad business. The reason I assumed that the reporting mentioned a claim of a debt of only 2.5kEuro. While I do not know what margin a street dealer operates on (probably more than 10% and less than 50%), 2500 Euro does not sound like a lot of supply for a dealer.
My best estimate is that the murderer was a street level drug dealer, and the victim convinced him to spot him a few 100 Euros worth of drugs which he was totally going to sell to his friends (but instead used up himself) and the claim of 2500 Euro include a loan shark level interest rate.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
28m ago
Do you think that the Honduran or Mexican illegal tenant housing advertises their roommate openings in Craigslist, in English? No. This is absurd to believe. Especially not around farming operations.
shoeonfoot
35m ago
What you're underappreciating is that @AlexanderTurok is basically getting modded for being annoying.
Which is the right thing to do. Turok knows what he's doing; he's obviously a smart guy and would otherwise be a valuable contributor were it not for the needless sardonicism.
You are right that there are users here, notably @WhiningCoil, who consistently adopt the most uncharitable framing of their opponents' arguments, but they do it in a less annoying way.
Funny, that episode is I believe a major reason why the Nazis wanted to burn evidence.
At Auschwitz the documentary archives were essentially captured intact. There are many thousands of contemporary documents in the historical archive at Auschwitz, which is why the complete lack of documentary corroboration for the existence of an extermination plan that killed over a million people at the camp is so conspicuous. Even the top-secret decodes intercepted by the British, which captured top-secret communication between Auschwitz and SS command, contains not a single iota of reference to an extermination plan, in fact it contains precisely the opposite: reporting of death toll caused by epidemic typhus, with SS command ordering the death toll to be reduced "at all costs" in order to maintain a productive workforce.
In many cases the evidence was withheld by the Soviet Union themselves, like the Auschwitz Deathbooks- 45 volumes of from the camp political department registering the death of almost 69,000 prisoners from 1941 - 1943. Why would this evidence be withheld for so long? In other cases the evidence has been outright fabricated, as we discussed recently David Cole in 1992 exposed that the "gas chamber" shown to millions of tourists on the tour at Auschwitz was actually fabricated post-war in Soviet-occupied Poland and presented deceptively as an original structure.
So you have evidence which ought to be there if it had happened, but it is conspicuously and entirely absent- like any documentary reference to an extermination of a million people in the camp records or in the top-secret decodes; then you have evidence which is there- the gas chamber structure at Auschwitz itself, but it turns out it's fabricated post-war by the Soviet Union. The point being, the confession of Hoess is extremely important because without it the entire Auschwitz Extermination Camp narrative does not have a leg to stand on. There's no backup- the entire narrative rests on the reliability of this tortured confession extracted under duress during a World War which has been proven to be extremely unreliable in key respects, like the description of the sequence of events that led to the creation of the gas chambers at Auschwitz.
When it comes to burning bodies, crematoria featured at many concentration camps which are not claimed to have had any gas chambers like Buchenwald (although it was originally claimed Buchenwald was a Death Camp with gas chambers this was disproven). So you have concentration camps like Buchenwald with state-of-the art crematoria, but the Treblinka extermination camp did not have any crematoria and allegedly used the most primitive means imaginable to allegedly dispose of 800,000 bodies.
And even burning a body does not remove the evidence: if 1 million people were cremated at Auschwitz-Birkenau, according to Grok that would produce 2,5000 metric tons of 5.5 million lbs of cremated remains, or 3,000 cubic meters of human remains by volume. These remains, though, have never been found or identified. They are just gone. At Treblinka the cremated remains of 800,000 people are allegedly buried in precisely known locations, although scientific excavation of those mass graves has never been done, with Jewish authorities citing the exact same reason as the Canadian tribes for forbidding excavation of the Kamloops Children's mass graves.
There was non-invasive GPR analysis of the grounds of Treblinka studied by Caroline Colls, which you referenced, but the results essentially disprove the possibility that ~700,000-800,000 people were buried there before all allegedly being unburied and cremated on makeshift open-air pyres. But Caroline Colls was forbidden from performing excavations of those ground disturbances.
You've demonstrated to me that I cannot trust anything you say about even the simplest of facts, including representing the "mainstream," so you'll excuse me for wanting you to at least make an attempt prove your assertions by default when you say things like "which is known."
No, there was no gas chamber at Dachau. Dachau originally was perhaps the most notorious "Death Camp" originally according to Allied Propaganda. You review this clip of Dachau from the Concentration Camps film submitted and screened as evidence at Nuremberg where the narrator claims:
Hanging in orderly rows were the clothes of prisoners who had been suffocated in a lethal gas chamber. They had been persuaded to remove their clothing under the pretext of taking a shower for which towels and soap were provided...
The Mainstream position admits that this film submitted as evidence at the Nuremberg trial was a lie. It's true that they still claim the "Brausbad" at Dachau was a gas chamber, but it was never used. The Dachau museum for years had a sign in that room that labeled it "Gas chamber disguised as a shower room- never used as a gas chamber". So the mainstream admits, despite the evidence submitted at Nuremberg making the claim, there were no gassings at Dachau.
So this is fabricated? https://www.livescience.com/44443-treblinka-archaeological-excavation.html
I would definitely encourage you to watch this Revisionist analysis of the Treblinka: Hitler's Killing Machine cited in your link. They did not excavate any graves at Treblinka II, they found a clay tile and misrepresented a manufacturer's logo as being a Star of David intended to lure Jews into the gas chamber with a false sense of security. The absurdity of that TV special is so profound it is just best to review that film if you're interested in the Revisionist analysis of that TV special. Let me know what you think of it if you do.
We'll never know, but it's entirely possible Hoss witnessed some experimental gassings at Treblinka I.
No, it's not possible at all. There's not a shred of evidence for gassing at Treblinka I, not a single mainstream historian claims there was. Mainstream historians simply ignore the issue, the only people who point it out anyway are Deniers. I can't even give you an explanation for how mainstream historians would square the round hole there. I can tell you though they wouldn't claim there were experimental gassings in Treblinka I.
Frankly I trust the NSA and CIA on this analysis.
The precursor to the CIA- the OSS was the progenitor of many of these claims from the West Allies in the first place. This includes the Psychological Warfare Division (PWD) "investigation" of Buchenwald which falsely claimed to uncover lampshades made of human skin and shrunken heads of murdered prisoners manufactured by the SS.
The real conspiracy isn't that the Nazis tried to exterminate the Jews, it's that the Allies and Jews created the appearance of the Nazis trying to exterminate the Jews.
Wartime atrocity propaganda is ubiquitous in warfare and especially modern warfare where mass media makes public perception extremely important. It's important to moralize the home-front and demoralize the enemy and provide moral justification for your war in the international community. In World War I the British conspired to create widely believed but false propaganda regarding "German Corpse Factories" which are eerily similar to the claimed "extermination camps" where millions were lured on the pretext of taking a shower to Factories of Death. There is a huge amount of historical precedent for false atrocity propaganda, it's an issue we have to deal with now with atrocity claims made by both the Israelis and Palestinians. There is no historical precedent for the German "Extermination Camps", it stands out as an outlier among all of history.
If you consider the perspective of the Western Allies, finding a moral justification for the war was extremely important. Poland was not liberated, it was conquered by the Soviet Union along with half of Europe. Europe was essentially destroyed with tens of millions dead. The Holocaust is very important in providing a post-hoc moral justification for the war which is essentially the foundational myth for American global empire and 20th-21st century morality. It's your own prerogative to trust the CIA, but in doing so you should at least understand the incentives involved in maintaining this narrative. Without it, a lot of historical and cultural perspectives we take for granted as black-and-white become much more ambiguous.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
39m ago
I have read the first book and seen the movie. I think the movie is great, but it was one that got better on repeat viewings for me as I came to appreciate the characters and setting more. As in the book I have read in the series, the movie is more about the relationship between Aubrey and Maturin, and being an interesting depiction of life at sea, than it is about the plot.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
40m ago
Stolen valor available for a couple Benjamins at any strip mall is pretty much the story of tattoos.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
43m ago
Who knows?
It also probably correlates with sleeping with sluttier women, against religiosity, and with a lot of other things.
But it seems like the best way to assess a metric by revealed preference vs survey design.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
47m ago
Why do you think it makes sense to say that the views of some random politician are emblematic of the "online racialist Right"?
She's a member of the United States Cabinet!
Lotta people have gotten used to being out of power. Now that Trump is President they're forced to either defend the administration they supported and voted for or criticize their own side, and they don't want to do either.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
51m ago
AlexanderTurok, You claim that you are "anti third-worldism", but if that is true, why have you consistently aligning yourself with those who are trying to make the US more like a third-world country against those who want to make it great?
It wasn't MAGA that turned San Francisco into a fecese-strewn open-air drug market. It wasn't MAGA that worked behind the scenes to put a dementia patient in the Whitehouse. And it is not MAGA that has been marching in solidarity with HAMAS, shooting at federal officers, or trying to put a Communist in Gracie Mansion.
Good thing I haven't aligned with any of that.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
51m ago
Absolutely.
A big part of it is also that to obtain the same net rebelliousness requires more and more and more tattoos. A Wild One era greaser with a motorcycle maxed out his rebellious/scary/intimidating points with an upper arm tattoo of a heart reading "Mother."
Now a normal upper arm tattoo doesn't even register, so a guy with the same tendencies gets fifteen tattoos on his hands and neck to get the same impact.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
54m ago
So you want a serf/slave class of the "inferior" brown people because such jobs are below the dignity of the "superior" white people (never mind that white people all over the world used to, and still do, such jobs). We needn't be afraid that the browns will do anything, because we should (as the superiors) ensure they have no rights apart from being cheap disposable labour until robots can do the job and hence they will be debarred from polluting our culture due to not being able to influence it, and we shouldn't encourage white people to pick up the slack by doing these low-class jobs because such jobs are only fit for low-class people and we don't want low-class white trash, that reflects poorly on our superiority.
I don't agree with "no rights apart from being cheap disposable labour." All their negative rights should be respected, though not "rights" to collect welfare or anything like that. The issue is not specifically racial. I don't think anyone should aspire to those kinds of occupations, nor romanticize or fetishize them.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
54m ago
I'm open to using a different metric, it's certainly not perfect. If for no other reason than bagging a 9 at age 20 and marrying her is a better "sexual success" metric which requires a higher degree of net attractiveness than would having one night stands with twenty 4s over twenty years.
But that's the statistic we have that doesn't get caught up in other problems like survey design.
are willing to do genuinely difficult farming for long hours when the social conditions are right.
WWOOFing is just the domestic equivalent of the Peace Corps. Americans are willing to travel to dangerous third world countries to do backbreaking work for a year or longer, with the understanding that they're going to return to America and resume their normal lives. The vast majority of WWOOFers and Peace Corps volunteers are not going to pick strawberries or build houses in Guatemala as a career.
I am saying that agricultural work will look more like WWOOFing in the absence of semi slave labor.
I doubt it, mostly because WWOOFing is in no way a substitute for the large-scale industrial farming necessary to feed a wealthy nation of 300,000,000 people. It'll be mostly legal Hispanics and Asians, and hopefully some white and black people as well, who take over the jobs from the illegals.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1hr ago
This is kind of a boo out group post but taking it at have value:
my kid's Waldorf-inspired day care teacher has visible arm and leg tattoos. She's sweet as can be, and has two adorable kids of her own.
Plenty of people in my part of the world use tattoos to signal that they're into this archaic revival stuff to prove that they're not soulless office drones. There's plenty of legitimate jobs that aren't office work, so, seems fine.
I was indeed offering a hypothetical (mostly based on my limited knowledge of OP's situation and the fact he has described himself as a "depressed shrink"), but I half agree and half disagree with what you've written here.
As for anhedonia I have no answer. It's a term I learned on reddit, meaning at first I assumed it was just a pretend word meant to be a catchall excuse for not getting out of fucking bed. I'm not unwilling to believe it is a real thing, but I would suspect finding the root cause of this and sorting it out should be any one individual's main goal in life if he finds himself suffering from it for any length of time. Of course for the anhedonic there is always the convenient excuse: They simply don't have motivation to do anything. I cannot imagine a household where anyone would accept or tolerate this without taking some action to sort it.
Speaking as someone who veered closer to suicide at one point than I usually care to admit and who has also seen claims of poor mental health used as a way to excuse one's failures and a tool of aggressive manipulation (mostly by women who in retrospect exhibited many traits of BPD), I'm of two minds about this. Sometimes it can be beneficial to adopt the mindset of "pull yourself up by your bootstraps and stop whining" and it helps induce a positive feedback loop wherein doing more productive things in turn improves your mood and consequently motivation, but there is a point beyond which it will actually make things worse; beyond a certain level of despair some external assistance can be necessary. Of course it's always a problem that should be solved, it should never be left to fester, but maturity is knowing the appropriate context in which one should deploy these two strategies.
Not enough time is a flimsy excuse. There is nearly always enough time for anything that matters. We carve out time for what is important to us. We do what we have to or need to do before we do what we want to do.
I don't necessarily disagree, but "anything that matters" is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here and doesn't really tell you what you should prioritise, since that is a value judgement that's heavily dependent on the individual. Yes if you're an extremely unhealthy weight, losing that weight should be your priority. On the other hand, if you're within a healthy range perhaps reading books, learning things, etc may actually give you more utility than losing that extra weight and getting swole, depending on what you personally value.
Tradeoffs inherently have to be made, and inevitably you will not have enough time for something.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
I'm going to push back on this- no doubt you can get some heiresses to work on the partyfarm, but agricultural work is sufficiently terrible that it requires non-free or at least desperate labor to get done in sufficient quantities. Guatemalans, convicts, helots, the corvee- this is who's always done heavy farm work.
Now operating machines is fun and sexy and high status, so mechanization changes that, but some farming will probably never be mechanized. The alternative to strawberry pickers from Chiapas is either a) enslaved strawberry pickers[in America, these would probably be prisoners] or b) not having strawberries. Now migrant labor doesn't have to change the demographics of the country- we could send them back to Honduras or Oaxaca or wherever to enjoy their pay in a much lower cost of living locale when the season is over- but let's be real here, America isn't going to do the smart thing.
shoeonfoot
1hr ago
Only places I've ever been around where the white and black Americans stick together in contrast to the other groups have been meatpacking plants.
Construction sites as well, at least where I live.
It was! Which may have been why people expected him to subvert it.
Yudkowsky said he thought it was blatantly obvious as soon as we found out that, e.g. Quirrell and Voldemort (by Quirrel's own admission!) were trained in the same martial arts dojo by the same teacher.
But I think many people (myself included, I guess) were expecting some kind of clever double-twist to be revealed later.
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