domain:alexepstein.substack.com
HereAndGone
2m ago
Does anyone who isn't a full on progressive zealot disagree with you that a person tatted up that that guy is probably bad news?
Tattoos, and lots of tattoos, and prominently visible tattoos, are now socially acceptable in more and more milieus. You can even do social psychology about the prejudice!
shoeonfoot
5m ago
Thanks for the acronym, but you have not demonstrated that wide-scale WWOOFing (we gotta come up with a better name, right?) is a sufficient replacement for the food needs of 300,000,000 Americans.
I have some observations and questions after browsing the WWOOF website.
-
How long does the average WWOOFer WWOOF for? Are they willing to settle down on a farm for 20+ years?
-
It looks like WWOOFers work on small organic farms. Can WWOOFing really be scaled to meet the needs of a giant industrial nation?
-
The average WWOOFer looks like a gender studies major from a liberal arts college. Most of the people who sign up for this type of thing would almost certainly be against mass deportations.
-
From most of the testimonials I've been reading, WWOOFing seems more like interning on a homestead than working on a for-profit farm. The farms that WWOOFers volunteer on are producing food just for themselves, not the community.
-
"Lots of the scions of high human capital humans do it." Lots of leftist women, it looks like. Which is fine, but your original comment made this sound like something different, at least to me.
In sum, WWOOFing seems exactly like the kind of thing that idealistic, liberal, young women do during college to feel "closer to nature" before they graduate and shop at Whole Foods for the rest of their lives.
I think it's much more likely that illegal Hispanics will be replaced with legal Hispanics if mass deportations actually happen.
HereAndGone
5m ago
Hey, I come from a time and place when teething remedies were "some whiskey in the milk". But when you have eight kids, the older kids are doing a lot of the work minding the younger ones. It's the first one or two need the most attention. And it was not commonplace for everyone not wealthy/high status to put their babies into an entire separate room on their own (and the people who did do that, also employed nursemaids and/or nannies to attend to them during the night):
In Edwardian times, for the wealthy and mid-tier classes, a nursery was a suite of rooms at the top of a house, including the night nursery, where the children slept, and a day nursery, where they ate and played, or a combination thereof. The nursery suite would include some bathroom facilities and possibly a small kitchen. The nurse (nanny) and nursemaid (assistant) slept in the suite too, to be within earshot of the sleeping children.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
16m ago
From what I've read, the movie tried to compress the stories from several novels into one, which causes it to jump from scene to scene awkwardly.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
22m ago
if you are as racist as you claim, then surely you would prefer to live in a place where all jobs were done by white people, if only because it would mean that you would only have to interact with white people. But instead your position is that for abstract reasons, it offends you to allow white people to do manual labor, so its better to import brown people to do it, even though it means that you and your friends and family have to interact with brown people all the time?
Without anti-discrimination law people would be able to choose whether or how much they want to interact with brown people.
And you now risk brown people becoming a meaningful voting block in your society that can never be expunged.
A reasonable concern. But it's worth looking at the impact on America so far. In Florida and Texas, the majority of Hispanics voted for Trump. Hispanics nationally still voted slightly more often for Democrats, but if you account for the fact that Hispanics are more likely to support centrist than far-left Dems, (just look at the melanin content of a pride rally or a DSA meeting) it doesn't seem like they're moving America to the left at all.
hydroacetylene
25m ago
yet there may be a lesson present about engaging in drug transactions with someone covered in face/neck/head tattoos.
I'm pretty sure that the number of drug dealers without tattoos rounds to 0.
hydroacetylene
26m ago
Men date plenty of women who ruin their lives- just usually not through violence, because women are less violent than men. Strippers are definitionally attractive to men.
HereAndGone
29m ago
Yeah, the victim isn't 100% blameless either, he was an unmarried father-of-two (it's unclear if he was living with his partner or separated from her) and he was buying drugs from his 'friend'. But he might have been going to change his life around (he was working as a chef), it's hard to know because of course the family will always say the victim was a great guy.
He wasn't covered in tattoos and crazy looking like his drug-dealing friend, though.
whatihear
30m ago
A lot of drug dealers are fronted their supply because they don’t have the cash to buy it directly. They pay for it when they get their next re-up. This is how businesses in basically every other category work, so it shouldn’t be surprising. Street peddlers in their third world also borrow their merchandise. Retail stores borrow to buy merchandise. It would be weird if drugs was the one line of business where no one used debt financing. It’s just a more competitive economic structure so it will outcompete people buying up front.
Think about it from the perspective of a cartel boss. You have 1000 kilos of coke to move. You could either distribute 5 kilos at a time to the 5 guys who can afford to pay up front and take forever to move your stuff, or you could front the product to dozens, and move it way quicker. The second obviously makes more money quicker. The fact that you’ll have to break some legs from time to time is just some overhead.
hydroacetylene
30m ago
I may agree, but every study has found tattoos correlate with an increased number of sexual partners in men, so clearly it isn't a widely shared belief.
Is this due to tattoos being attractive or is this due to tattoos strongly correlating with the combination of aggression, independent-mindedness, unrestrained mores, etc that is probably more determinant of an individual man's number of sexual partners?
HereAndGone
32m ago
Yeah, but a lot of these women grew up in shitty conditions of broken families, single mothers, drugs and petty crime in the environment. They should know better. They seem not to, and I can't figure it out.
I see the same in reporting of abuse cases, where the current girlfriend gives a character reference to the guy accused of stalking/beating his ex. I do not understand the mindset. "Oh yeah, he beat her up but he'll never do the same to me!"
Then again, there are women out there in affairs with married men convinced that any day now he'll get that divorce and marry them, or they are weeping over how he's been lying to them. Yeah, imagine that: a guy who has demonstrated he will cheerfully lie to his wife about what he's doing and is willing to cheat on her then turned around and lied to you/cheated to you, his adulterous affair partner. Whoever could have seen that coming?
HereAndGone
35m ago
the Zoomer broccoli haircut
Is that the same one as the undercut hairstyle? Because I can't stand that, especially when partnered with the hair dye. It screams "I am a Special Snowflake, dare not to impugn my Queerness!"
HereAndGone
37m ago
Yeah, I'm coming around to "by the time you rack up your tenth conviction for a violent crime or you have a proven track record of being a professional shop lifter, no more 'second chances' or out on bail early, you go to jail and do your full time".
There's just too many "and the guy who raped/murdered/did bad thing was found to be on early release/out on bail for a previous charge of rape/murder/doing bad thing" instances. Maybe that's because those are the ones who get reported so it's a Chinese Robber Fallacy, but you know what? I don't care if it's a fallacy. This pitbull mauled fifteen other dogs before, I'm pretty sure it's going to maul a sixteenth if given the chance.
HereAndGone
41m ago
I'm a woman myself, I don't understand it, but I've seen enough of women who do hang out with these kinds of guys and shack up with them and have kids by them.
I don't know if it's because they've grown up where all the men around are like this, or what.
HereAndGone
42m ago
I think that once something becomes socially tolerated, you get more of it.
Then (for the example of the police) standards get lowered since you can't get enough recruits the conventional way, so you relax some of the conditions: "okay, now tattoos are fine".
Then it becomes a job where only or mostly "guys with tattoos" do it. So you don't get the guys without tattoos applying anymore, and this just reinforces "yeah this is lower-status now than it was before, so guys with few other options are the workforce here".
FD4280
44m ago
I think I previously watched/read a few that were set in Europe, and wasn’t too impressed with either. I don’t enjoy TV very much in the first place, and the books felt much weaker than Cornwell’s Arthurian/Viking-Saxon/medieval archer book series or Patrick O’Brien’s works.
This one was a nice surprise.
HereAndGone
44m ago
Not just hacking, hacking hard enough to nearly sever the leg completely:
The medical evidence was that such was the ferocity of the attack that the sword cut through muscle, artery and bone. Mr Baitson was rushed to hospital for emergency surgery. However, he died four days later.
...Evidence was also given at the trial by Assistant State Pathologist Dr Margaret Bolster.
She said that a postmortem examination indicated Mr Baitson had died of haemorrhage and shock complicated by brain damage due to lack of blood supply from an injury caused by sharp force.
What she described as a single blow from a sharp weapon like a samurai sword caused a fracture to the knee bone and sliced through the two bones below the knee, the tibia and fibula.
He was paranoid, probably high himself, and just a thug.
HereAndGone
53m ago
It may be more relevant than I thought! Guy with scraggly beard and hair like a bird's nest versus guy who at least trims his beard and washes his hair: who looks like trouble you'd want to avoid and who looks at least semi-respectable?
One tattoo on its own is not an indicator of trashiness, but the thing is: some people can stop at one tattoo. Some people, on the other hand, seem to go "just one more. One more. One more" until they're covered in them. This guy is described as a tattoo artist which may be the excuse he gives for 'what do you do for a living?' or it may just be a self-description: "ah yeah, I make my money from doing tattoos for people, not from drug dealing".
I have to come out and admit I'm prejudiced. Not just because I think a lot of tattoos looks trashy, but also because a partner of a family member was something I moved from being neutral about, to disliking, to writing them off as a manipulative shit head. And funnily enough, they got a tattoo later in life, then went the "just one more" route, then shaved their head, then moved on to full-blown "being a manipulative shit head". So my priors on people with tattoos may well be contaminated 😁
sodiummuffin
57m ago
I may agree, but every study has found tattoos correlate with an increased number of sexual partners in men, so clearly it isn't a widely shared belief.
Despite the emphasis that tends to be paid to it in media and discussions, surveys indicate that casual sex is only practiced by a fairly small minority. The norm is serial monogamy, under which "more sexual partners" just means more failed relationships than the guy who had the same girlfriend the whole time. Now, it's possible men with tattoos are also more likely to have a romantic/sexual partner at all (after all both "getting a tattoo" and "asking out a woman" might be considered a form of risk-taking), but number of sexual partners isn't the right metric to determine that.
HereAndGone
58m ago
I think guys like this one aren't particularly benevolent to their families, they just haven't turned on them yet.
The allegation is that he and the victim were friends, and that's likely; the victim was buying drugs off him, after all. But when your friend is your dealer, he's not your friend anymore.
This is also dragging in another one of my hobbyhorses: "whaaat's the haaarm in a few druuuugs, bitta fun, should be legaaaal". Well, maybe legal drugs in this instance would indeed have kept the man from getting killed by the paranoid, possibly high, 'friend' who was claiming he owed a huge drug debt.
But the problem is the 'friend'. A junkie who was doing some minor dealing, probably dipping into his own supply, probably being leaned on by his suppliers (who are not nice people who think drugs are wonderful and everyone should have free access to them so we'll supply them) for the missing money, getting paranoid and trying in turn to lean on his customers with claims that they owed more money than they did. This was not somebody doing 'few druuuugs, bitta fuuuuun'. Drugs and guys like this don't mix well (neither does alcohol, I'll freely admit that). The drugs legalisers seem to push the idea that drugs are just harmless party fun and if legal nobody would ever have any bad outcomes.
Yeah, I don't think so.
Quite apart from the fact that this guy is plainly psycho enough/stupid enough that he can't figure out "don't walk into court on a serious charge grinning like it's a day out at the beach" in all the photos taken of him.
Blueberry
1hr ago
This is so fucking primal that you see fashion Heiresses getting knocked up by sexy felons and a literal Rothschild leaving her husband to date a rapper.
Looked both up as the links were a few years old:
Chloe Green does have a son with Jeremy Meeks, but they soon separated. She now has a second child with a successful businessman who is not as tall, is white, without tattoos and has a dad body.
And Kate Rothschild has a baby with a (lot younger than her) soyboy environmental activist.
The hot criminal seems to do ok. He doesn’t have a superstar career, instead a bit of modeling and acting in cheap D-Movies, but a quick search doesn’t find any scandals or unhinged drug stories. I found a recent interview where he sounded normal and self-reflected.
The rapper Jay Electronica was for a time a mysterious wunderkind star, but he never delivered (people waited a decade for his first lackluster album). He made the news a few years ago for this banger verse:
"I bet you a Rothschild I get a bang for my dollar, the synogogue of Satan want me to hang by my collar"
There's no reason there can't be life elsewhere, it's a big universe. Even intelligent life. Even intelligent life at, or above, our present level of technological advancement.
Where the big, improbable jump lies is from "aliens exist" to "aliens exist and visited/visit our planet".
I could imagine alien scientists examining specimens of humans; we do it with animals (see monitoringbirds) and with anthropologists turning up to bother the last 'undiscovered' tribes that won't immediately kill them. But that has to first get over the hurdle of "space is very big and there's no evidence they ever got here". I went through my Ancient Astronauts/von Daniken phase in my late teens/early twenties. All the 'look here is an Egyptian tomb painting of what can only be a circuit board with transistors!' is convincing - when transistors are cutting edge tech. Twenty years later, that's not convincing any more because now we've moved on and we'd expect aliens with spaceships to be even more advanced than we are, not using tech that's outdated within twenty to fifty years.
I don't believe in the advanced tech all the wishful thinking here engages in:
"We're talking about people that worked for the Pentagon, worked in a government program, where they worked in and around this technology. Whether it was through crash retrieval, or through reverse engineering, that's what we're pursuing right now."
What I'm starting to think is that UFO rumours were great propaganda during the Cold War. The USA is a global superpower but it's not the only one. Russia (and to a much lesser extent China) are there breathing down their necks. The USA had the atom bomb first, but they weren't able to remain sole possessors of the technology. Everyone is working to have the best, newest, most kaboomy big-kaboom! first.
What better way to muddy the waters than to let hints slip out about amazing new tech? Even better - Russia and China can console themselves "okay their scientists got there first but our guys are smart, too, and it's just a matter of some light spying and a lot of hard work to catch up or even pass them out", but how can they do that if the rumours about the tech are that it's not human, it comes from advanced alien civilisation that crash landed in the desert? How will you catch up then, unless you get an alien UFO of your own?
Yeah, they're not going to believe random "Joe Blow says he saw something in the sky" but if you have all the dedicated True Believers talking about secret bases? my cousin knows someone who knows someone who swears he saw bodies being carried away? here's a leaked report of a military pilot talking about the mysterious craft that shadowed them on this flight?
Now you've got them chasing shadows trying to catch something that doesn't exist in the first place. And again, if they do catch wind of anything advanced you really built using your own human scientists working hard, then that is just more bait for "and what about the stuff we're not seeing? what if they really have something even better under wraps?"
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
1hr ago
Any time anybody uses "the establishment" you are free to ask who they mean specifically. Most of the people using the word here actually have specific answers.
Only one tattoo? How big? How tasteless?
It's not all tattoos, it's the "covered head to toe in badly drawn, stereotypical crap" tattoos.
And now I realise I've wandered into the minefield of deporting immigrants based on tattoos: no, that's not a gang symbol or a drug symbol, he just, er, likes nature which is why he has plant leaves tattooed on his hand! 😁
More options
Context Copy link