domain:academic.oup.com
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
9m ago
Meng Hao walked into the McDonald's. The cultivator taking his order gave a derisive snort, but Meng Hao did not really care, because he had repressed his aura down to the Single Patty Realm, and a fool would not be able to tell his true level of burger eating.
"Give me... a Happy Meal!"
The cultivator's face flickered before he finally regained his composure and laughed. "You couldn't afford a Happy Meal. Get lost! Don't you see that there are Double Quarter Pounder Realm eaters waiting behind you?"
Meng Hao slapped his bag of holding and threw 80 billion spirit McDonald's coupons onto the counter, causing an earthquake which demolished half of the restaurant. Everyone dropped their jaws. None could see how this was possible!
"I'll take that Happy Meal with a side order of fries, " Meng Hao said. He was as calm as the ocean in a painting of an insanely calm ocean. "And let me see your manager!"
The cashier cultivator coughed up a mouthful of ketchup. He simply could not handle Meng Hao's killing intent, because he was only at the Quarter Pounder with Cheese realm himself. Even though Meng Hao had suppressed his aura, because he had cultivated the Heavenly Burgin' Qi, this was enough to kill people a few levels higher if he truly wanted.
It was then that another man which a much more fierce aura stepped forward. "You dare make trouble here?"
"P... Patriarch Hamburglar!"
Patriarch Hamburglar was 99 cents of the way into the Big Mac Realm, plus tax! Meng Hao was pushed back two feet, knocking over a soda machine. Powerade Mountain Berry Blast geysered outward, killing several onlookers.
Of course, Mayor McCheese saw all this happen through the window.
Meng Hao coughed up a mouthful of blood, snorted, constricted his pupils, and then his expression went calm. He unleashed the aura of 64 patties, condensed down to a 2 patty stack that could fit into his mouth!
Mayor McCheese coughed up a mouthful of cheese. His pupils constricted.
"Is this... Seeking the McRib stage??"
Meng Hao had the gentle air of a scholar, but it wouldn't stop him from killing several people in a McDonald's.
"Burger Devouring Scripture! I'm Lovin' It!"
With the first keyword of the Burger Devouring Scripture, everyone below the early Quarter Pounder With Cheese stage exploded into purple mist. The light of the immense heavenly burger shone down with the contours of a golden arch as 9 illusory burgers floated around Meng Hao's body, which is probably an important xianxia number that matches the number of lakes in some sacred Chinese province I've never heard of. But that was only a fraction of Meng Hao's power. He waved his arm, bringing forth thirty more cultivation techniques that hadn't appeared in over 400 chapters!
"Heavenly Tribulation Fries! Eastern Everburning Egg McMuffin! Fruit Smoothie Guillotine! Soul McCafe Mocha Incarnation!"
Meng Hao's expression was the same as ever as he slapped his bag of holding, and brought out his karmic ketchup packet, Fry Cook Lord medallion, seventeen different wooden time spatulas, a five-coloured resurrection coupon, the silk burger wrapper, various souls of lightning McNuggets that he may or may not still have, and his mask of the legacy of Ronald McDonald. Oh, and the image of a flying Chicken Snack Wrap dragon appeared. Remember that? It was basically his Main Thing at the start of the novel, but quietly faded into irrelevance. Until now!
All of this takes some time to describe, but actually happened in the space of only a few breaths.
"What! Impossible!"
Meng Hao wanted to summon the parrot as well, but it was too overcome with eroticism by the purple fur depicted on a nearby poster of Grimace, and was busy drilling out a glory hole straight through the poster, and the wall it was pinned to, with its strong parrot erection.
But it was more than enough. The Hamburglar's soul flew out and was absorbed into his mask! He screamed as his body was destroyed completely.
Meng Hao brushed off his robe and swept up his spirit coupons and everyone's bags of holding which probably didn't have any cool sh*t inside unless I write him into a corner later, and anyways, don't worry about it for now. He surveyed the rubble that was all that remained of the McDonald's.
"Guess I'll be taking that Happy Meal... to go!"
jake
12m ago
As things stand, even now, the reward for these commentators is the next decade of watching powerlessly as their political party fades to nothing. At best their names will be remembered for when their presence is ejected from a reborn left that has wholly excised its bond with identitarian politics. These commentators themselves will fade into nothing and die in irrelevance. The punishment has been imposed, their deserts ever-coming.
At worst, for them not everyone, the violence continues, and each new perpetuation will be cause to take more scalps. The punishment then will also not be death, it will be what Stephen Miller wants, as he understands what is both the most effective and the most righteous punishment: exile.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
12m ago
Was that "Operation Forward Trace"? They got FFLs to sell guns to cartels, then crowed about how Mexican cartels were buying guns in the US?
stuckinbathroom
21m ago
Tyler specifically waited for Kirk to badmouth transpeople before firing his shot. In fact, I'll go so far as to speculate that if Kirk had been gracious in his response, the Tyler may not have even shot at all.
Uh, weren’t Kirk’s last words about gun violence in the US, not trans people?
Also, how exactly do you think Robinson was able to hear what Kirk was saying from ~200m away? Even though Kirk had a mic and amplification, it didn’t look like there were speakers set up within earshot of Robinson’s vantage point. Are you suggesting that he was watching the livestream on his phone, just before picking up his rifle and assassinating Kirk?
HereAndGone
23m ago
In fact, I'll go so far as to speculate that if Kirk had been gracious in his response, the Tyler may not have even shot at all.
Yeah, right is the only response to this. "Darn it, I carved the mottoes into my ammo, I changed my clothes, I came all this way and the guy is just talking about who's gonna win the next Superbowl? Well that was a waste of my day!"
HereAndGone
24m ago
That's a long comment to say "Kirk was asking for it".
Also, we don't know the guy's motives yet, so all the speculation is just that.
Also also, I've seen it bruited about that Kirk's last words were in response to a question on gun violence, not trans issues, unless that's what you mean by "trans shooters".
I don't think Robinson would have gone there all tooled up, positioned himself on the roof, waited for Kirk to say something mean about the trans, then packed up and gone home if "Oh, okay, he didn't say anything". He was going to shoot no matter if Kirk had been saying "my favourite soda is Classic Coke".
Goodguy
26m ago
Maybe so are assassinations. They're really really rare, but sometimes they have a huge emotional impact on society.
ThisIsSin
PC is for progressive-conservative
30m ago
I’m not sure I entirely buy her thesis
I do. Gynosupremacist thought (erroneously called "feminism" here) is legitimately terrified of straight men doing this to women. "Kill all men"... before men kill all women. This is existential, instinctual, foundational, horrible anxiety.
Some humans are more driven by raw instinct than others.
the dynamics I’m talking about manifest at timescales larger than a generation.
The dynamics I'm talking about manifest at more immediate timescales. Men are strong enough to do the heavy lifting that is required to secure better sources of food; women are not, thus women die without men. I believe 'helper' was the term used in Genesis.
Interestingly, in places where you can't take two steps without literally tripping over food and game animals, women rule precisely because they have little existential need for men. Their cities consisted of these long houses: the earliest arcologies. This typifies certain civilizations historically native to North America because, prior to 1800 or so, those were the conditions on the continent.
I don’t think one can reasonably call a gender relationship “parasitic” in any biological sense.
Sure you can. The problem comes when you turn "parasitic" from description to prescription, and it's not acceptable to do this for the same reason it's not acceptable to cheer murder of your political enemies. It's a fundamentally symbiotic relationship where one part needs to not be [seen to be] exploiting the relationship, either in reality or in the eyes of the other.
Ademonera
42m ago
There is tons of evidence of premeditation and careful planning put into this. No post hoc justification for Charlie mentioning the issue for which he was apparently killed. Maybe the person heard it and timed it I guess, but this comes some two weeks after a similar belief system mass shooting in recent memory (and a third a few months ago). I agree that transgender rights are centered around the issue - but it’s become clear that there is some loose association between transgender supportive online groups and radical left politics. Doesn’t really matter how he talked about the issue either - the implication is that people against this issue are putting themselves in danger of future violence by speaking their minds.
This forum has a certain leaning to it - moving off reddit naturally attracts more dissident and people here lean relatively rightward (ignoring lineage of SSC first etc).
Reddit is the most mainstream network and can get towards radical politics, but it’s usually attention seeking and inauthentic (North Korea stans etc). X pretty similar.
Discord, 4chan, probably telegram - these are places where small groups of people are communicating radical ideas in a more personal forum. It’s what the classified info poster used as well. I think it’s more inviting to total ideological capture and feeling ‘rewarded’ by those you know for dedicating yourself to the cause.
The ‘terminally online’ behavior others are mentioning here has been a reoccurrence with people that have committed mass violence this year (don’t forget that there have been HISTORIC level of political violence over the last year). I would bet that there is a significant effort going into threat assessments and online surveillance into continued violence from online communities with radical trans acceptance politics, among other groups
shamgar
48m ago
Thanks, it certainly seems like the book deals with precisely the sorts of things I'm interested in.
zeke5123a
55m ago
Stop trying to justify murder. Kirk could be ungracious in talking about trans people. There is a trans problem (and indeed trans is an incoherent absurd belief). But even if you disagree, killing isn’t the way to do it.
I’m sure you’ll protest “but I’m not excusing the murder.” Yet you said you believe Kirk would be alive if he had been more gracious. Quoting for the full paragraph.
“Not convinced? Okay, notice when the shot happened: Tyler specifically waited for Kirk to badmouth transpeople before firing his shot. In fact, I'll go so far as to speculate that if Kirk had been gracious in his response, the Tyler may not have even shot at all.”
Mihow
Lipstick on a guitar
56m ago
But Kirk goes out of his way to be an ass here, to pander to low-class right-wing bigotry.
Could you point to … several of these instances?
Kirk is like the polite Ben Shapiro.
He got a boyfriend and radicalized himself online and took out the biggest target he had available.
Lack of mystery to me.
‘ look at me dad ‘ x100
zeke5123a
1hr ago
But it wasn’t a random person being killed — it was a person a number of people labeled a fascist. So we are to believe he was using catch phrases that map to his target (per target’s enemies) but that was happenstance and instead he just was crazy?
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
1hr ago
If he was in fact dating a tranny, then the "the killer was radicalised by transactivists" theory is probably correct.
Assuming it wasn't transactivists, the whole reason why this is a dankest timeline scenario is that if Robinson was, in fact, radicalised in the online computer wargaming community, then his motives have essentially nothing to do with mainstream politics, but nobody is going to believe this because of the obvious political associations of the wargamer memes he wrote on the bullet casings. The point is that the explanation for "catch this fascist" would only be comprehensible for someone familiar with the memes of the relevant online community.
I don't know very much about the culture of online wargaming, but the tabletop wargaming culture has a number of features which means that I can imagine a very online version of it being a risk factor for radicalisation.
- Neurotypical people are under-represented
- People who think political violence is cool are over-represented
- People who imagine themselves as badass warriors despite having the physique of the typical tabletop wargamer are over-represented
- There is minimal stigma against ideas that the rest of the world sees as linked to unsavoury politics because someone has to play Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, the Confederacy etc.
orangecat
1hr ago
It's the timing that made it bad.
Cheering it on as it was happening is different than telling a joke one week later. Like, give it a day.
I think a lot of people are making political hat out of this mask off moment. Turning this into a slippery slope ignores that.
orangecat
1hr ago
It's not just people celebrating political assassinations, it's people celebrating as it happened. It's kind of mask off, in my opinion.
Wait a couple days and make any jokes you want. But pointing and laughing at someone who is bleeding out implies a serious level of dehumanization.
Pongalh
1hr ago
Yes, again, we're not doing the same thing. I'd reframe it as, "illiberals have been treating political disagreement as an existential and moral struggle for years..."
stuckinbathroom
1hr ago
I agree with you on this. As much as my libertarian-ish heart hates the idea of government meddling in the free market, I do grudgingly admit that the EU is onto something with their regulations prohibiting employers from taking any adverse action in response to an employee’s personal social media activity.
Since it’s a matter of EU law, companies no longer have to worry about policing this shit: they can just throw up their hands and (rightly!) say “wellp, nothing we can do”. And naturally, this implies that the activist class (on either side of the culture war) can’t rack up any wins by threatening to boycott some company unless they fire so-and-so for some unconscionable post on InstaBlueTokBookX.
As the GMU Econ crowd is fond of saying, solve for the equilibrium—IMHO it’s a much more civilized one than what we get in the land of laissez-faire. This is at least as good a case for the role of the state in preventing runaway Molochian escalation spirals as China cracking down on extracurricular tutoring hours.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
1hr ago
I fortunately do not have any personal friends or family members who are literally celebrating
I've also been fortunate that the people I've spoken with in person have been horrified by what happened. But my friends are generally conservatives or moderates. My mother, who really liked Kirk and occasionally tried to show me some of his videos, cried. The moderates are in shock and are terrified we've created a culture of violence.
I know a few people who are progressives of some description, but overwhelmingly they're straight-laced people who abhor violence. I'm sure there are some people I've been friends with at some point in my life who are being terrible right now (I can think of names), but outside of work I don't know any hardcore progressives right now. And people at work haven't brought it up.
thrownaway24e89172
Death is the inevitable and only true freedom
1hr ago
(The irony about the perfect woman being someone who is not aggressive is that he ended up married at age 56 to a lawyer. Maybe I'm stereotyping lawyers, but that seems like the aggressive type to me!)
His preference was probably "not aggressive [romantically/toward him]" rather than "not aggressive [in general]", given the combination of socially awkward and "dominated by his mother".
Botond173
1hr ago
Wehraboos, in a nutshell, believe that the Germans had the best weapons, tactics and commanders in WW2, and only lost the war due to the numerical and material superiority of the Allies, who also committed just as many war crimes as them.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1hr ago
Lower middle class. I have never made double the minimum wage for Albuquerque, though I make more now in raw dollars than my dad did by his retirement. I have had three cars since 2000, each lasting a decade.
Soteriologian
1hr ago
When the Luigi news first broke, it wasn't clear why he even did what he did. Luigi didn't seem to have much of any passion for politics or even any discernible political affinity, and yet... clearly his action was political and extreme.
To recap for anyone who didn't read the psychoanalysis I never wrote, what actually happened--you'll pardon my pretense in mind-reading--is that Luigi had a bad experience with health insurance that led him to personally believe that the Health Insurance Bad narrative was vindicated. He had a spinal injury which caused him chronic pain, had The System tell him "nope, there's no cure for this, we won't help you." He researched the issue for himself, concluded "um, yes, there absolutely is", told them, was explicitly denied coverage because "it won't work", then somehow got the treatment without his insurance, and it totally worked and he felt great with all the chronic pain gone. This experience led him to conclude that yes, The System is indeed following bullshit financial incentives that have nothing to do with patient welfare, and thus The System is in need of a good burning.
So, to our latest incident: Tyler Robinson. Like Luigi, he's from a fairly high-tier background, has excellent test scores, has little discernible affiliation or concern for politics at all, and yet, like Luigi, he seems to have committed one of the most extreme political acts one can do. What's going on?
Well, if you listen to Twitter (never, ever listen to Twitter), what happened is some evil Antifa activist group Radicalized (TM) The Shooter using Internet Technologies like Reddit and Discord. Or maybe it wasn't Antifa, it was actually the University System -- in this particular case, the radical leftist institution of Utah State, which he attended for, uh, one semester in 2021. Look, feelings don't care about your facts, sweetie, the point is Leftists indoctrinated him and we need to crucify all leftists so they stop indoctrinating us.
Ahem.
Alright, so what really happened? The thing that puzzled me at first--my thoughts polluted by the above nonsense--was why Charlie Kirk? Surely there are better targets. Like... well, ok, I'm not going to put myself on a list by naming names, but I'm sure you can think of them. Kirk was basically just Bill O'Reilly for zoomers. He's not really a thinker or anything, just some rhetorician funded by establishment right-wing money to publish zingers on TikTok. Why would he be the target of choice?
Well, as we learned today, Tyler may have had some, uh, lapses in his Mormon Orthodoxy. Nothing big like drinking coffee or anything; just having a roommate that was trans. If you've seen the photos, the roommate isn't exactly attractive, like a Furby, and he seems to just sit at home playing video games all day. Moreover, far from the Twitter narrative, he seems to be fully cooperating with the investigation and doesn't appear to be any sort of mastermind or ideological zealot at all.
When the news about the roommate/boyfriend broke, I joked in our group chat "imagine your boyfren blasting a public figure for badmouthing your cute lil bussy. now that's true love". But the more I thought about it, this explanation made a lot more sense than any of the narrative silliness from Twitter. Unlike Fuentes or Trump or the Mormon Church or most other right-wing figures, Charlie Kirk uniquely comes across as scornful and mocking, especially with respect to this particular issue of trans people. (If you've never watched Kirk before his death, you may not understand this properly, as obviously only the clips that make him look like a saint are shown now). Of course, I'm sure the Mormon Church and Fuentes wouldn't condone trans stuff, but they'd have the standard tradcon view of being sincere and gracious and wishing you'd see the light. Trump and Vance probably don't care at all, with Trump being a NYC billionaire and Vance being a rat-adjacent. But Kirk goes out of his way to be an ass here, to pander to low-class right-wing bigotry.
Not convinced? Okay, notice when the shot happened: Tyler specifically waited for Kirk to badmouth transpeople before firing his shot. In fact, I'll go so far as to speculate that if Kirk had been gracious in his response, the Tyler may not have even shot at all. The audience member at the mic presumably tries to make a point that transpeople are not statistically prone to violence by starting with the question "Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?", and instead of replying "I don't know", Kirk replies with the deflective and maximally-inflammatory "Too many." The shot came a few seconds later, but I think this was when the shooter decided to aim carefully and fire. Kirk demonstrated he had no interest in discussing actual numbers that might fail to make transpeople look bad, he just wanted to play rhetorical judo and try to find his dunk.
Now, make no mistake, I'm not contending any of this was remotely justified, or that Kirk was right or wrong, or whatever. My contention is the shooter perceived Kirk as someone interested in making transpeople look as bad as possible, regardless of whether that was even justified by data or not, and that infuriated him, because his Furby little roommate was not like that. It's not merely a disagreement about trans stuff, it's "You are full of shit, and you are touching the apple of my eye." And, well, love can drive a man to mad decisions - a tale as old as time itself.
So that's my explanation of what actually happened. It has nothing to do with being "radicalized at university" or being in some antifa group or whatever.
Of course, nobody cares what actually happened. We want our culture war, and by golly if this will fuel it, pour it on the dumpster fire!
jkf
1hr ago
There was an early twitter-person of interest who is a trans and seemed to have posted with advance knowledge of the shooting how much he hates Charlie Kirk and how "something big" would be happening at the event -- Omar-something is the handle?
It would not be very surprising if this turned out to be the roommate/girlfriend as well -- although FOAF is also possible.
Come on, do you guys even check before posting? I haven't hung around here much for years, but every reply I'm getting is like... multiple standard deviations below my expectations. This place is a hollow husk of its former self.
The questioner started with "Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?" to establish the first data point, then followed with "Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last 10 years?" to establish the second. The questioner was obviously attempting to make a point about the rate of transpeople committing violence vs the overall expected rate.
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