domain:gurwinder.substack.com
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
9m ago
It makes WW2 look nice by comparison
WW2 involved deliberately flattening German and Japanese cities. Allied strategic bombing alone is estimated to have killed over a million civilians in the space of about four years. And that's before we talk about the Soviets or the Axis.
quiet_NaN
13m ago
UD: lindy
Adj. Something that is expected to have a long lifespan by virtue of having existed for a long time, based on the lindy effect, named for the New York restaurant Lindy's, coined by Albert Goldman and popularized by Nassim Taleb
TIL.
If you claim is that prostitution has been around since the dawn of time and will not go anywhere, I agree.
If you are arguing that prostitution is generally less problematic than internet porn, I disagree. Sex work, like sex (or driving a car) covers too many vastly different behaviors to make a general moral judgement.
I would imagine most wives would rather have a husband who spends 1k$ a month on OF than one who spends the same amount of money on local hookers. (And would like it even less if he spend the same amount on another woman who was not a professional.)
quiet_NaN
29m ago
Sports betting, OnlyFans (etc.), and addiction level of marijuana use are, to me, the three horsemen of tolerated social degeneration.
While casinos, drunken hookups, and addiction levels of alcohol are good and wholesome parts of our culture!
I do not think that 'social degeneration' is a useful concept. From its Latin roots, the phrase implies a recession as compared to one's ancestors. Personally, I do not believe that the median ancestor of today's population was a paragon of social virtue. I think they are more than likely to fall under the umbrella of drunkards, wife-beaters, snob, killer, small-minded villagers, etc.
Of course it would be nicer if people did sports instead of being obese, played board games instead of abusing drugs, had healthy and loving relationships instead of parasocial OF relationships, played in the woods instead of on computer screens, had lively discussions with their friends over tea instead of arguing with strangers on the internet, learned their miscalibration through the sequences rather than through losing their life savings, etc.
But name-calling us for not doing that (not that I indulge in any of your favorite three forms of degeneracy, personally, but that is besides the point) is not going to change anything.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
31m ago
As with many things in the digital era, the distinction is friction. Having to go to a casino or a brothel (or, I suppose, a strip club might be more analogous to OF) applies a measure of braking force on vicious impulses. The ability to pick up your phone and indulge sets the bar for self-control vastly higher than needing to go out. I also suspect that for some people, the physical act of spending money triggers more aversion than an equivalent digital transaction.
TheDemonRazgriz
31m ago
There's a great quality yet cheap Japanese place called KENKA on Saint Marks Place. $7 for a bowl of hearty ramen and $7 for a 20oz bottle of beer with good vibes.
$7 for a bowl of ramen in NYC?!? I’ll keep that in mind for the next time I visit.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
37m ago
There’s no official policy on including xitter threads. So long as you pass the effort threshold, you should be good.
atelier
Jimmys: unrustled
55m ago
I'd guess it's also driven by wall posts being easier to scrape and share the whole history while messages make it harder for one subscription to get all the goods.
birb_cromble
58m ago
hypervigilant
I don't know man, that seems like it's just about the right amount of vigilant.
It's really heartening to hear how much you're doing to look after your kids. Take care of yourself.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1hr ago
See I tend to see it in the opposite way. Men are not the default, as men have to earn the right to be seen as men. Women have to basically grow boobs and they’re women. Children are children by default as they are born as children and remain so until they become something else. If I have to achieve something to be considered a real man, then being a man is not the default.
I think in both cases you see the person not really wanting to grow up. They want to be the opposite gender in ways that don’t force them into adulthood.
ThenElection
1hr ago
I feel like the $82M is pretty much rage bait/marketing bait. It's best considered more like a lottery ticket, except instead of $2 it costs you your dignity and thousands of hours of work to have even a remote chance of earning even a hundredth as much. Women are as much victims of this scheme as the audience of men are.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1hr ago
It’s not meaningless when you’re trying to trace the Overton window.
I’ll assume for the sake of argument that Israel is trying to ethnically cleanse Palestine, that Harris recognized it, and that she also knew supporting them would lose her the election. Why, then, wouldn’t she say it out loud?
Whatever you think Kamala lost by supporting Israel, it would have been much worse if she’d said “yeah, kill all those brown people.” The costs massively outweigh any benefits. That’s what it means for something to be outside the window. Even if one believes it, one can’t say it out loud.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1hr ago
I don't consider that strawmanning, I consider it a misunderstanding of my position. It does illustrate my point though. I would not light matches to see for myself, no, because a fire-fighter telling me there is a gas leak in my building is an immediate authority dealing with an ongoing situation. A police department's press office is a completely different animal, they are engaged in narrative control after the fact. Conflating the two and suggesting they require the same level of compliance... I don't have a brand, I have a label maker and OCD.
Anyway my point is that Pyongyang or London, lumping official statements in with facts and logic is downright insidious. As for 'nudging your priors at least a little' if that is indeed all you meant and it wasn't an ironic 'OBVIOUSLY this is the correct take' line, then you should think about how you write everything else in your post, especially the faux wistful "Of course, if you prefer your axes in the hands of twelve-year-olds fighting imaginary Bulgarian sex pests, I suppose nothing I write will convince you otherwise." that follows it. That is not the language of the thoughtful truth seeker, it is the language of the partisan drawing battle lines.
You began with your preferred narrative - "little ned girls harassed a dude who didn't deserve it" - and then assembled your evidence to support it, deploying the official statement as a key soldier in your army. That is the same thing the telegram denizens do. The exact same thing. You are outsourcing your critical thinking to people who don't deserve it.
This has led to what is today a democratic system where the president and ministers are superficially interchangeable but decide nothing because they're all controlled by intel services from behind the scenes with pedophile porn blackmail on every statesman.
Well, Trump actually has pedophile porn blackmail on himself, and everyone knows it, but he seems to be getting along pretty well. I think the truth is a bit more mundane than that- there's simply no pressure to do anything effective outside of the inertia of conservatism bureaucracy, so it just drifts that way. Even though those in the bureaucracy might be empowered to make decisions, the question of what decisions to make becomes difficult, so "advance the kingdom of Jesus [or his modern equivalent, LGBTesus]" becomes the default.
The trick about the American state is that they legitimately are both competent and significant enough on the world stage for that competence to be meaningful, unlike every other state except for maybe Russia, China, and I guess France.
mercilessly culls its elite preventing corruption and is thus impervious to being infected itself
The US doesn't need a service to do this, mostly for HBD reasons. The thing the US population (this is an English heritage thing) is easily corrupted by are the promise of 51% attacks, where half the society + 1 person forces their own corruption on the other half minus one. It's "democracy", you see- and the demos is just as corruptible as the kings and nobles of old (which is why people who know they're doing wrong hide behind "but The People make the rules"). BLM is a particularly salient example of this. So is Brexit, for that matter.
As for 'schizo nonsense', this is the Russian political MO and has been since at least Tsar Alexander, if those Historia Civilis videos are at all accurate. He doesn't actually understand this (due to having a particular/modern political bias), but openly absurd and inconsistent bluster and back-channeling and threats of force and just bog standard J. Jonah Jameson-ing is just kind of how these guys work. It's an unstable stability, if that makes any sense.
The obfuscation the Russians employ is that you can't even figure out what their kind of dishonesty actually is. If you can predict the manner of a man's dishonesty (or more properly, his interests), you can plan for and bargain with and manage him. It makes sense, then, that confusing how others would predict the manner in which you will be dishonest today could be a valid negotiating strategy.
It makes sense that Trump, being accustomed to that style of negotiation, would find it easier to work with a person whose entire concept of statecraft is (by some geographical-social necessity) basically just that, in contrast to his own empire's provinces who negotiate in that stereotypically feminine way where everyone pretends they don't have authority over anything (to say nothing of the Chinese, who have 2000 more years of experience in that negotiation strategy).
Lorian_Aristedes
1hr ago
I live in Australia, it’s not regulated at a federal level but state by state. I live in one of the states where it’s fully legal and regulated, I prefer it that way.
Mandatory STI screening, no pimping, tax deductions for condoms, whips, dildos, or whatever for the workers - I think it’s the right way to go about it. The industry won’t just disappear if it were criminalised, it would just become more dangerous, less sanitary and more likely to involve exploitation much like other countries where it exists in the shadows.
The Alice and Bob model is inherently deficient when talking about politics because you're not talking about unitary actors but distributed groups of tens of millions of people. Bob isn't angry because Alice defected. He's angry because he heard Alice's third cousin defected. There's also the distinct matter of asymmetrical vindictiveness. If Alice and Bob 'cheat' at a similar rate, but Alice is (relatively) forgiving while Bob is hypervigilant against cheating and believes in escalatory retaliation, you get a situation where Bob is constantly saying he has no choice but to flip the table to restore balance despite being no better behaved (at best). (See: the GOP's efforts to overturn the 2020 election)
It's deficient for another reason as well: if Alice collectively represents liberals and Bob collectively represents conservatives, there's a problem with the cooperate/defect model, because Alice and Bob have different values and thus different ideas of what it means to cooperate or defect. To pick a high profile historical example: the confirmation for Robert Bork. The Democratic view was that Republicans defected by putting forward a deeply unsuitable judicial nominee. The Republican view was that the Democrats defected by rejecting a perfectly qualified nominee on spurious grounds. Voting rights/voting access are another standout area where normative differences lead to mutual perception that the other team is trying to cheat.
ThisIsSin
Liberty has an anti-privilege bias
1hr ago
Romanes Eunt Domus.
However, that look and posture (and the actions that brought them to this) demonstrates these people have integrated perfectly into British society, because that's exactly how the natives act too.
ThisIsSin
Liberty has an anti-privilege bias
2hr ago
The way you discipline other people's children in Britain now is by filming them carrying axes and swords, and the State carries out the punishment by proxy.
It's been hinted at in other places in the thread- the state of mind of the filmer was relevant. Was he primarily concerned with public safety, or was he getting that rush of power, that delightful (and stereotypically British) moral treat, that getting to call the cops on someone else is?
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
2hr ago
One creator (read: one single internet girl) has certified gross earnings in 2024 of $82 million.
On the other hand, only the top 0.1% of creators (approx 4380 people) earn anything that makes it look like a career. The next order of magnitude (approx 39400 people) earns just 40 grand a year each. Which is not a bad side hustle if you can streamline the process, but not exactly something that will let you FIRE.
The 99% earns peanuts.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2hr ago
I've seen the story make it's way through the feeds. I'm reluctant to believe because of how easy it is to prove/disprove for any "field correspondent" and how much egg on face it would be for thrainstream. Not that it hasn't happened before, I suppose.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2hr ago
There’s a great YouTube channel which covers the different games. He’s also got PvE and PvP matches. I’ll see if I can dig up the link when I get home.
ThisIsSin
Liberty has an anti-privilege bias
2hr ago
Of course, if its an actual organized gang, the knife and axe won't ultimately protect her either.
Indeed, the gang putting its explicit stamp of approval on the migrant rape gangs- that being the British government- has tanks and fighter jets.
What will an axe or sword do against them?
FtttG
2hr ago
One creator (read: one single internet girl) has certified gross earnings in 2024 of $82 million.
Who is it?
Your example reminds me of this other example from a Church of Christ.
My Christian friends often wonder aloud with me what it'll take for us to again recognize an in-group cultural identity among ourselves (a conversation typically prompted by the construction of our brand new fuck-you enormously gargantuan Islamic cultural center), and my answer is always something that this is an example of: innocent Christians being persecuted.
And I wonder how many Christian children killed by trans gunmen will be enough. It's actually quite remarkable how much less sensitive than Jews Christians are to this kind of thing. Remember that Baptist hospital (now run by Episcopalians) that was bombed in the first few weeks of the war in Gaza? No?
Canada had an outbreak of church burnings over that Indian burials on schoolgrounds hoax, and not a word about it from any of my church staff. I'm not even sure if they were aware! NPR certainly kept quiet about it. Edit: NPR was not quiet about church burnings in 2006 and 2015, as long as you were a black church. I also briefly googled about the 2021 burnings and most forum discussion and coverage are contemporary, and they're taking the burial narrative at face value. Most sympathetic pieces are from very partisan sources.
Not closely related to what you just said, but it's something I think about more and more.
My understanding is that it’s most of them, and “all my videos are on my onlyfans!” is a marketing differentiator. You pull the suckers in with a subscription, and then upsell them on individual pieces of content once they’ve built the loyalty of having already given you money. Onlyfans subscribers are a customer base pre-selected and filtered for willingness to give you money to see you naked.
But also the Russians have cornered the market on “free access to archived onlyfans posts from any popular user”, having redistributed the means of reproduction. If you know you know.
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