domain:alakasa.substack.com
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
5m ago
Prescribing cocaine and heroin is, unfortunately, not a viable cure for depression.
Has anyone tried? In the manner of these studies I mean, not by just looking at addicts. People whove done heroin generally report that naive use is an experience beyond anything they had before. I would not be surprised if this influences people even months later. But it also might not, there are always those pescy details. E.g. maybe it overlaps too much with the alcohol high to show effects in our society.
Its more that we have now found multiple drugs with different mechanisms of action, but apparently similar in terms of how they are used and effect against depression, and all of them are used recreationally for their short-term effects. That suggests to me that it works off the recreational bit, and it again wouldnt be super surprising if it did. "Drugs can make you feel better when used responsibly" is hardly a new insight - the entire problem is the way they lead to non-responsible use.
Also curious what you think of this one.
No_one
6m ago
Cooking is simple. Just read the instructions, then do it. 2/3rds of recipes can't really be messed up in a truly bad way either.
I keep hearing about these guys I can't cook, but looking at my parents I'm pretty sure "can't cook" is just calculation. "If I never learn to cook she can't ask me to cook."
I started cooking for myself as soon as I lost access to subsidized meals. It wasn't difficult at all. Pretty much every single guy I've ever lived with could also cook. Not that big a sample, sure, and they were mostly engineers, but still..
Rov_Scam
6m ago
I think Hood is underrated, but only to the extent that he was merely a bad general and not in contention for the worst the Confederacy had to offer. What frustrates me with a lot of Civil War discourse, especially online, is the same thing I mentioned earlier about judging actions with knowledge of the outcome in place. Yes, Hood's actions look bad when we know they were unsuccessful. The problem is that, at the time, it wasn't obvious that these actions were worse than any of the realistic alternatives.
To put the whole issue into proper context: In the spring and summer of 1864, the overall Confederate strategy was hold off the Union until the November elections, in the hope that war weariness would usher in a new administration with a mandate to make some kind of deal. To this end, it wasn't critical that they score any major victories, but it was critical that they prevent the Union from getting any of their own. Ever since losing Chattanooga the Joe Johnston playbook had been to stake out a defensive position, only to abandon it after getting outflanked. He'd given Davis repeated assurances that he'd hold behind this river or whatever, then not like his position and retreat. After several weeks of this Sherman is on the outskirts of Atlanta, a city the Confederacy can't afford to lose, and Johnston is talking about giving it up.
At this point Davis, who didn't like Johnston to begin with, is getting fed up and is probably getting deja vu about the Peninsula campaign, where Johnston did the same thing around Richmond, which probably would have fallen if Lee hadn't taken over and changed strategy. So Johnston gets cashiered in favor of Hood, who has a reputation for fighting and will at least make an attempt at fending off Sherman and saving Atlanta. Hood, true to his word, launched a series of ill-fated assaults against Sherman that do nothing to stave off the inevitable and only serve to inflict casualties he can't afford to lose. Buffs like to argue that Johnston would have at least kept his army intact, but an intact army is useless if it isn't going to defend anything, let alone something as critical as Atlanta. There was pressure from the president, the state legislatures, and the public to do something, and Hood at least did something. I'm not going to comment on whether what he did was ideal because I'm not an expert on battlefield tactics, but the buffs who criticize Hood aren't criticizing his execution.
So now, to get closer to answering your question, we get to the fall, after Atlanta is in Union hands and Sherman is aiming to push to Savannah. Hood didn't attempt to stop him because he knew that the endeavor was pointless. He could have slowed the march but not stopped it; he would have fallen farther and farther back, desertions and casualties increasing with every passing mile, and there would have been nothing left of his army by the time Sherman got to the ocean. Furthermore, there would have been no reason for Thomas to keep his troops in Tennessee. He could have either invaded Alabama unopposed, or joined up with Sherman to give him 120,000 men to Hood's 40,000. So Hood made the decision to move toward the Alabama line, cutting off Sherman's communications. This would purportedly compel Sherman to leave Atlanta and divide his army, sending one wing to protect the threat to Tennessee and the other to hunt down Hood, who would get the opportunity to fight the remaining forces in Georgia on the ground of his choosing.
Sherman did indeed give chase, and Hood found the area he wanted to give battle, but Sherman showed up with his entire army, which was more than Hood could handle. At this point, Hood was stuck; if he took up a position, Sherman could do the same, and hold him there while Thomas came down from Nashville to hold him while he turned toward Savannah. Or he could hold him while he sent Thomas into Alabama, before turning toward the sea and forcing Hood to give chase, which wouldn't do anything but waste Hood's time. So instead he decided to give up Georgia and head north to Kentucky, hoping he'd have better luck where he wasn't at such a numerical disadvantage. If nothing else, it would keep the Union out of Alabama.
It's worth also noting that the Confederate army was having serious problems with desertion at this point, largely driven by the hopelessness of the situation. The buffs who talk about how Johnston would have at least preserved his army don't realize that no one wants to spend weeks putting his ass on the line in rear guard actions defending land you intend on giving up in a few hours without any immediate prospects for taking the initiative. On the other hand, if you go to Tennessee where you can win a few battles and keep the Yanks out of Alabama, there's much less temptation to desert. If nothing else, it might force Sherman to pursue and backtrack out of Georgia.
For Hood's part, he was wildly overambitious, thinking he could march straight into Kentucky, replenish his army with locals, and force Sherman to abandon Georgia to keep him from crossing the Ohio or, alternatively, that he could march from there into Virginia and hit Grant in the rear, crushing his army. Fantastical, yes, but at this point in the war, the only way to keep morale up and preserve any chance of winning is to go for a knockout blow. Even defeating Schoefield would have been enough to effect a short-term reorganization of Union priorities. Again, we can argue about whether poor tactical decisions led to Hood's downfall and the destruction of The Army of Tennessee, but criticism of Hood isn't that he blundered away good opportunities; to the contrary, if anything good is said about him it's that he was a competent corps commander under Lee but was too aggressive to command an army. His actions were all failures, but it's not like there were a ton of obvious alternatives.
WhiningCoil
9m ago
Oh I think it can very well both be true that a whole class of people are undesirable and that there is no realistic way of getting rid of them.
I mean, I would be content to start restricting suffrage, ending birthright citizenship, and generally "fortifying" out democracy from being co-opted by third world mobs.
Unfortunately, the more I study history, the more I see that all political solutions are temporary. There is only one solution that is permanent, and history is littered with the names of long extinct tribes. Mere curiosities with no survivors to complain, and by and large, the world is better off with that being so.
No_one
13m ago
What if NEET preferences are just born from someone jerking off to sexy NEET photos as a kid? Or maybe their mother was untidy and a bit of a slob? Maybe some of them really just want desperation, but I'd not underestimate the variety of male ideals that seem to range from furries, thru catgirls to robots. Someone being into girls who are a little slobby seems .. reasonably normal.
No_one
16m ago
Christ, women must hate her with a burning passion. @Sloot is hitting the nail on the head there. They envy her because she, despite her manifest flaws, age, and rough looks, she locked down the second richest guy in the world. Who is, by most accounts of people who reported to him, one of the most terrifying, ruthless and capable nerds out there. No doubt he smells fakers and gold-diggers before they round the corner. Yet this plastic bimbo somehow got him.
least comfortable in his marriage
Going by the charities his ex-wife keeps donating to, she must be either trying to get back at Bezos or is a liberal NPC. I'm not sure how happy one might be with
phosphorus2
25m ago
You are misconstruing
Given that he has called himself a socialist and he addressed a significant group dedicated to socialism where he quoted approvingly from the Communist Manifesto, seems like they got it right.
as
one time said something in a speech
If Mamdani did actually did actually give a speech at an event for socialism, in which he described himself as a socialist, while approvingly quoting foundational socialist texts - that is very obviously not "one time said something in a speech".
Corvos
30m ago
Humans naturally imitate those of higher status, which means that de facto aristocrats (/celebs/billionaires/influencers/sportsmen) will continue to lead by example whether they want to or not. What we abandoned was requiring them to put some thought into it.
That's funny, it's the inverse of a common Revisionist joke about why people are so upset over the good news that ~3 million Jews weren't gassed inside shower rooms. "Rabbi, good news..."
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
31m ago
Safe Injection Sites. And the provenness of their effectiveness is certainly disputed. As is that of enforcement, as the 80s drug war showed. And rehab is a joke.
Zephyr
33m ago
I'd rather be talking to my agent than looking at code.
What type of developer are you if you'd rather be talking than coding? /s
More seriously, the situations I find AI is really useful is when I need some information, but have enough knowledge to fine tune it after the fact. I've tried to use it to write code, and it always produces code that is kind of messy and bad. I asked it to produce some builder interfaces from a set of DTO interfaces, and it would do weird things like put in defaults that I didn't intend, or return the wrong field occasionally*. What worried me about it is that the junior developer I was working with at the time was copy-pasting them into the codebase as is, and didn't have any comprehension about why they wouldn't work.
*For reference, the type of implementation I was talking about would be something like:
interface IAddress { function line1() : string; function line2() : ?string; function city() : string; function province() : ?IProvince; function country() : ICountry; function zipCode() : IZipCode; }
interface IAddressBuilder { function setLine1( string $line1 ) : static; function setLine2( ?string $line2 ) : static; // you get the picture }
It would give me something like:
interface IAddressBuilder { function setLine1( string $line1 ) : static; function setLine2( string $line2 = '' ) : static; function setLCountry( ICountry $country ) : static; function setProvince( string $province ) : static; }
Which was just not very useful.
ChickenOverlord
34m ago
One of the times I was most proud of my dad was at scout camp. They had a bellyflop contest for all the scoutmasters and other adult leaders at the pool, and my dad had the smallest belly by a massive margin. And my dad isn't morbidly obese or anything, but he's certainly no beanpole either.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
38m ago
Men will bitch about their wives, but these same men would be eating a take-out sandwich over the sink without them.
I don't know, sure, some wives certainly make some men miserable. Any man with children (except in very rare circumstances) will say it's easier to have a wife.
faceh
38m ago
I mean, no accounting fully for taste. Lower back tattoos had their moment, those hair hump things, Jeggings. None of which did anything for me, my thing was pleated skirts. I assume there are guys who did get into mom jeans and might enjoy septum piercings.
Hence my point elsewhere that I rarely see women doing fashion trends that are completely repellent to men as a class, outside of direct political statements.
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
41m ago
I suppose that hasn't been the solution, no. I do on occasion feel guilty about being spiteful, jealous, cowardly or mean. But I do not seek to fix those flaws so that I might not be judged as harshly by God. The closest thing to it is that I would not feel just in judging God, as Lewis describes, for allowing war, poverty and disease, if I myself allow it in my small ways.
There's also the entire thing about framing sin as sickness - if I am sick, I might seek remedy for my own good, but why in the world would I feel guilty about it? Least of all before God, who is often described as the one who sends sicknesses down on people to test them, humble them etc.
Maybe all that compulsive society-scale guilt tripping is good for society in the long term, but I do not see why I should willingly submit to it where my own conscientousness suffices.
I have some really good male friends too. They know a lot of things about me that could be used to destroy me if they wished. But I trust them to not.
And vice-versa.
But you see, what happened is they all got married and so acquired a partner that could serve that role better than I could.
Which has left me with not many options aside from finding a good therapist if I really want to unload. Although my brothers (as in, actual biological brothers) are still very good for commiseration.
There are a lot of blackpilled guys who feel like sharing secrets and being emotionally vulnerable is one of the things that they explicitly can't do with women, because any perceived display of weakness could cause her to lose attraction, even deep into a committed relationship.
Yep. And that's one hell of a tradeoff to make to achieve reproductive success. I'd want to have a partner who I could occasionally vent to with the understanding that I would always get back to work and make shit happen, but had the basic, I dunno, decency, to get that part of their role was to help take the edge off the stress every now and again so I can be the person they need me to be.
(also, from very direct experience, I have much less need to vent about emotions when I'm getting laid on the regular. Almost no issues feel overwhelming when that primal urge is satisfied)
I'd also gently point out that it was safer to do this when divorce laws weren't as lenient.
aceventura
52m ago
Relevant comment from Jeremy Carl:
Despite the fact that they were not born or raised in America, Zohran Mamdani's mother was welcomed as a student at Harvard and his father is a professor at Columbia, two of the most elite American institutions. His father originally came to the U.S. as a sponsored college scholarship student from East Africa in a program that was funded by wealthy American foundations, with it's principal funding arranged by then Presidential candidate John F. Kennedy.
His maternal grandfather, Amrit Lal Nair, was a member of the ultra-elite Indian Administrative Service, perhaps the most important and prestigious job in India during his era-- it was a merit-based product of British rule. He had to flee Pakistan at partition in 1947 because of Hindu-Muslim communal tensions.
HIs father's family was able to go to Uganda to make their fortune thanks to the cosmopolitan nature of the British Empire. After Ugandan independence, his father's family was dispossessed and expelled from Uganda by the radical black nationalism of Idi Amin (they would ultimately return years later)
His father gave Zohran the middle name "Kwame" after Kwame Nkrumah, winner of the Lenin Peace Prize, and friend to Communist China, who turned Ghana into a one-party state and fostered a cult of personality around himself that would have made North Korea blush.
And Zohran Mamdani, by his own admission, grew up, largely n America, the privileged child of two affluent and famous parents.
At every stage, Mamdani's family, for multiple generations, benefitted enormously from the generosity and openness of the West. And at every stage, his family has spit on that generosity, allying itself with third-world socialist and communist movements, even though those movements were directly responsible for the oppression of their family.
Speaking intellectually, Mamdani's warmed over socialist/communist third-worldism is totally uninteresting.
Speaking psychologically, his family's deep-seated hatred for their benefactors and love of their oppressors would make a fascinating study.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
55m ago
I would like to meet these women, for research purposes. I know well some guys who would have sex with probably any woman who paid them even the slightest bit of attention. I also know guys who have absurdly finicky standards (or claim to.) I don't doubt your claim here but I've personally sailed through many siren-populated (if not infested) waters without earmuffs and been able to get through without diving overboard or crashing the vessel. Reflection suggests you're probably right, though. Maybe I've just been fortunate or the Matas Hari I'veet have been either insufficiently charming or insufficiently motivated.
I'm just saying. Women have almost universally settled upon their conception of what 'looks good' by way of what makes men pay them greater attention. In the west, at least, nobody holds a gun to their head to make them wear tight clothing that emphasizes curves and shows strategic amounts of skin, even when those outfits are less comfortable to wear. But they do wear such outfits.
Pull up photos of women attending music festivals. And I mean, regardless of genre, from (warning: Semi NSFW) Metal to EDM to Country, and see that while the aesthetics are different, women generally converge on outfits that are revealing and eye-catching and tight and emphasize the secondary sexual characteristics. (yes, admittedly this is prone to selection effects).
I don't think they 'feel' the biological basis, but its the rare woman who can ignore their own impulses and dress in a way that is actively repellent to men and feel truly satisfied and healthy about it.
Yes, there's some large amount of culturally-transmitted information about what is 'attractive' in the other sex as well, but we haven't seen so much divergence between humans as you'd expect if it were solely culturally informed.
Anyhow, humans are just responding to impulses and they don't really think a lot about where those impulses come from. If you're hungry, eat, if you're thirsty, drink. If you're horny, put on the standard mating display and see if you get any takers.
But humans also have brains big enough to create elaborate, usually post-hoc justifications for actions they take, and so they can pretend that dressing and acting in a way that effectively short-circuits the other sex's thought processes (b/c horny) and claim its all solely motivated by self-empowerment.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
58m ago
Speak my name, and after a week or so I'll probably appear!
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
58m ago
As someone who came from a Protestant backwater (evangelical non-denominational, essentially) I can attest to that! We didn't have Acquinas or Augustine or Calvin (and we didn't want them either!) but we had Lewis. We adored Lewis!
Why here's a potentially appropriate bit of Lewis now, on how non-Christians often view the idea of sin:
Apart from this linguistic difficulty, the greatest barrier I have met is the almost total absence from the minds of my audience of any sense of sin. This has struck me more forcibly when I spoke to the R.A.F. than when I spoke to students: whether (as I believe) the proletariat is more self-righteous than other classes, or whether educated people are cleverer at concealing their pride, this creates for us a new situation. The early Christian preachers could assume in their hearers, whether Jews, Metuentes, or Pagans, a sense of guilt. (That this was common among Pagans is shown by the fact that both Epicureanism and the mystery religions both claimed, though in different ways, to assuage it.) Thus the Christian message was in those days unmistakably the Evangelium, the Good News. It promised healing to those who knew they were sick. We have to convince our hearers of the unwelcome diagnosis before we can expect them to welcome the news of the remedy.
The ancient man approached God (or even the gods) as the accused person approaches his judge. For the modern man the roles are reversed. He is the judge: God is in the dock. He is quite a kindly judge: if God should have a reasonable defense for being the god who permits war, poverty, and disease, he is ready to listen to it. The trial may even end in God's acquittal. But the important thing is that man is on the bench and God in the dock.
It is generally useless to try to combat this attitude, as older preachers did, by dwelling on sins like drunkenness and un-chastity. The modern proletariat is not drunken. As for fornication, contraceptives have made a profound difference. As long as this sin might socially ruin a girl by making her the mother of a bastard, most men recognized the sin against charity which it involved, and their consciences were often troubled by it. Now that it need have no such consequences, it is not, I think, generally felt to be a sin at all. My own experience suggests that if we can awake the conscience of our hearers at all, we must do so in quite different directions. We must talk of Conceit, spite, jealousy, cowardice, meanness, etc. But I am very far from believing that I have found the solution of this problem.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1hr ago
I think the main feature male friends can't provide is being the confidant of deep secrets and more purely emotional revelations from the inner reaches of your psyche.
That's interesting that you say that. I'm incredibly lucky to have some male friends where we have essentially no secrets (or close to it, at any rate). But I recognize that that's unusual and most friendships (regardless of gender composition) never get to that level.
There are a lot of blackpilled guys who feel like sharing secrets and being emotionally vulnerable is one of the things that they explicitly can't do with women, because any perceived display of weakness could cause her to lose attraction, even deep into a committed relationship. I'd like to tell them they're being overly cynical, but I also can't say that their fears are entirely baseless either.
hooser
1hr ago
The proposed rent freeze is for rent-stabilized tenants, a specific class of asset. So hopefully you weren't trying to paint this as a city-wide rent freeze, which would never pass anyway.
You're right, it's not all NYC apartments, just half of them.
Mackenzie looks odd. She's got a very long neck, her hips are narrow. If she had a nice figure like Sanchez, even a less bouncy natural one and a proportional neck she'd be pretty attractive, but she's really a scarecrow.
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