domain:greyenlightenment.com
Okay, so women get unfair perks in the name of ending sexism. We talk about that a lot here. I don't see that having a lot to do with whether or not men can get a date.
the argument would be 'if women are attracted to men who have higher social status, money, property, etc., than they have, and we've created a society which makes women better off than men (at the expense of men), then women will not find the men the society has made worse off attractive and therefore more men cannot get dates and women will only be satisfied with a continuously shrinking pool of men'
Why do you think the 90s legal mores will be a stable equilibrium this time?
Griggs v. Duke power was in 1971. Price Waterhouse v Cooper was in 1989. The 90s saw the CRA of 1991 which put into statute bad court decisions around disparate impact and mixed-motivation being enough to show discrimination under the law. VAWA was in 1994. At best, the 90s were the last hurrah before social institutions had decayed to the point where they could no longer provide guiderails to the radical legal environment which had been created over the last two or so decades. And even if that's not true, there was a reason why these were passed in the early 90s and it's because the 80s wasn't a stable equilibrium either nor was the 70s or 60s or 50s. The legal environment had been pretty bad on this front for pretty long, but it wasn't until social conventions, communities, and institutions decayed to the point they could no longer provide sufficient guardrails that we saw the significant effects of them.
I was only cognizant near the end of the 90s so I don't have much experience with what they were like. When I speak to young people now in the real world about these topics, many of them have views which are similar to how you describe them on all sides of the divide. When I see others discussing the topic on this forum, it just comes off as older people who caught the last train out of the station before the power went off and they're on the right side of the bell curve on top of it. They really do not have a clue how bad it is out there for a whole lot of people.
In the past, older generations thought pairing off the younger generations into prosocial relationships was near the most important thing they could do for their children. Now, the best on offer appears to be "look 'em in the eye and give 'em a firm handshake" boomerisms directed almost entirely at males and general denial about the reality the younger generation is describing to them.
Jiro
21hr ago
The jobs feminine women perform don't care about three year resume gaps if there's a kid involved.
Wasn't one of the big complaints of feminism when it started that such jobs did care about the gap?
I don't generally disagree. Some unsorted thoughts:
- Being a subsistence farmer is even less aspirational than belonging to a trade, unless it's some kind of artisanal hobby farm. It was true in the Middle Ages, and is still true, just there aren't that many subsistence farmers left in the West to aspire to joining a union. My understanding of china is that there are still enough people left who have experience debugging rice fields by hand to be relatively grateful for factory work in comparison.
- T-ball? Just looked it up, TIL.
- "Having kids will not fuck up your career [...], or for the vanishingly few female long-haul truckers." If you mean that you can get back into it after a decade or so, I suppose. But what are they going to do, take their toddler in the truck with them? The dad will do all the evening care moms usually do? This seems really unlikely, like they would just get a different job entirely.
- My impression of the trades that don't use a lot of math is that they involve quite uncomfortable conditions, such that men will avoid them when they can. There are roofers out when it's 100 degrees in summer. Plumbers are trying to fit into crawlspaces under houses or around awkward fixtures in sinks (impression from some family members who work these jobs includes yelling and cursing while trying to hold some uncomfortable position and tools that don't quite fit properly). Restaurants involve hot kitchens, cuts, getting yelled at, and unless you're the chef, low pay. If someone is the chef or runs a company, that's totally fine, nobody's asking if he's looking to switch career tracks.
- It will be interesting to see what happens now that technology can replicate emails and spreadsheets, but not holding a tool in an awkward position while water is spraying on it.
Now sure, whatever it is Mackinsey consultants actually do, it's probably more comfortable and easier than electrical linemen. But at a certain point, shouldn't we as a society go 'it takes all sorts to make the world go round, why don't we make the top of every field prestigious, give everyone someone to aspire to.
That's not how prestige works.
American folk culture told a lot of romantic stories about cowboys, lumberjacks, trappers, all sorts of things. The guy who owns the roofing company probably has a wife and kids, and the people in his church respect him. Is that not good enough for him? Some things are harder to romanticize than others, but people have been making beautiful stories about the British navy for hundreds of years, I'm sure it's possible to draw attention to the honor of HVAC technicians. Winter on the Railroad , Landsailor, Logging Song
self_made_human
C'est la vie
22hr ago
Thank you. I try my best to make my existential angst both funny and educational. Sometimes this results in less angst!
self_made_human
C'est la vie
22hr ago
At times, I am dismayed by other doctor's if ignorance regarding base rates, relative risks, and their attitude towards pontification without additional qualifiers towards their patients. Of course, we're only human, fallible, and working with a patient population that isn't necessarily sophisticated enough to follow such caveats. I'm guilty of this myself, even though I strive to be better.
As far as I'm aware, there's no reason to think that finasteride must cause BPH and man boobs in your case. It increases the risk, but that's a quantifiable increase in probability and far from a certain Gu.
AFAIK, Rogaine is just a formulation of basic bitch minoxidil. It's inoffensive, doesn't have very strong effects, but when applied topically, doesn't have significant drawbacks either. We don't know for a fact how minoxidil even works, but the prevailing hypothesis is that it improves blood flow to the local tissues near where it's administered. This ?somehow increases hair growth.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
22hr ago
Nope, must have missed me. Got a link handy?
self_made_human
C'est la vie
22hr ago
My understanding is that this is a contested finding, but even assuming the usual relative risk of ED while actively taking finasteride (~1.5x baseline), the absolute risk is not so high that you need to run away screaming. That being said, unless my hair falls out by the fistful overnight, I would personally take my chances with minoxidil first.
I am weakly agnostic on this claim, but my primary motive was to explain that the claim by this pharma professor half a decade back was hyperbole.
sockpuppet2
22hr ago
I liked this comment. Comments like this couldn't be a regular thing, but I thought it was a good effort at introducing something that may not have otherwise been discussed, with its ineffectiveness most likely being mostly due to meta-discussion.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
22hr ago
It didn't come up, but I'm passingly familiar with what you're talking about. I believe that Scott has written about this a few months back, and the mechanism attributed was venous stasis/insufficiency causing the local hormonal levels to go too high.
Not related to balding as far as I'm aware, and largely out of my wheelhouse. I'll defer to Scott, and limit my commentary to saying that I don't see anything obviously implausible with the mechanism purported.
ABigGuy4U
23hr ago
I’m increasingly convinced Sam is a The Boys from Brazil-style clone of Leon Trotsky.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
23hr ago
Happy Solstice! Enjoy some mead-fueled rambling!
Earlier this week I was gazing into one of the endless amusing abysses of the internet when I stumbled across a post that spoke to me, all out of place. It was a brief meditation on aging and monogamy that echoed some of my own thoughts on the topic (tl;dr: a psychologically healthy man should still find beauty in the grandmother of his grandchildren), phrased and pic-related with a vibe I appreciated.
So I looked at the pseudonymous poster. They seemed to be some sort of TTRPG designer, or at least that's what their recent posts were about. A very brief perusal showed hints of extremely grognard-y concern about weapon minutia and a post talking about having bards be the representation of the gods, which were based on historical pantheons. Gave some extremely low (or even no) magic, gritty vibes, but that was a cool thought, using Bards telling stories of the Gods in the place of the more "mundane" divine power of healing and light spells. Felt like something William H. Stoddard would have put into a GURPS: Hyperborea book.
And, oh, cool, this person has an Amazon author page, let's check that and see what else they've written and-
It's Varg Vikerness.
Holy shit, I laughed my ass off. I really should have seen something like that coming. But it gave me a great excuse to remember one of my favorite memes.
And it gave me a good excuse to look up what happened in the Norwegian Black Metal scene in the early 90's, to at least Wikipedia standards of quasi-reliability, instead of just Shit My Punk Friend Told Me Over A Blunt Twenty Years Ago. There's a bunch of overlapping articles, but start here or here.
The overall picture I see, reading between the lines a bit, looks like a classic purity spiral. Euronymous installs himself as the Prince of Norwegian Black Metal because he owns the record shop and label and talks a very extreme game about how obsessed he is with death and nihilism and being maximally evil and hating everything bright and fair. But he develops a reputation as a poseur, a guy using the aesthetic for personal gain or self-aggrandizement. Meanwhile, newcomers are taking his rhetoric to logical conclusions and start taking actual actions, like burning churches and murdering strangers.
Feeling his position is threatened, Euronymous escalates his rhetoric, confiding specific, private death threats at other members of the scene. But he does this so much, to and about so many people, that rumors get out and one of those newcomers responds and kills him first.
It's an interesting look into the psychology of a subculture. And while I do appreciate some of the music and other elements, it just reaffirms how thoroughly I find that kind to evil-maxing to just be utterly gauche. For fuck's sake, kids, even The Crow is a fundamentally hopeful film!
But it's also interesting to square that nihilism with how Varg presents himself now, as a committed family man espousing a more positive vision of simple living and racialism (for which he was subjected to a Vampetaço).
And as an added bonus to this whole rabbithole, I got confirmation that Kulak is aware of his theme song, which I admit had been bothering me for a bit. You know I don't usually hold with the Abominable Intelligence, but this Imperium Hymn stuff - it's not bad.
Hell, let's be honest. Black Templar's Prayer is a fucking banger, and it's been dominating my gym-time listening for months. I'd shed blood to have Sabaton or Powerwolf fix the soulless bits and cover it.
Finally, hi Chris! Hope you're doing well.
gattsuru
23hr ago
I've fallen down the emulation rabbit hole. Or perhaps it's emulation hardware?
I was looking for a portable and moderately linux-friendly device to host this project that wasn't a stupid phone ... and I'm probably going to end up just using a busted-ass stupid phone, all the non-Apple dedicated 'tablets' are either huge or crap or both, and I had some familiarity with portable gaming handhelds like the Steamdeck and thought 'oh, how hard could it be to figure out one with decent battery life'?
Surely there must be some market between eWaste web browsers and ItCanPlayCyberPunkForFiveSeconds, even if it's a bit of a weird niche--
Who wants to drink from the firehose!
Okay, emulation has taken off. I'd messed around with SNES or PS1 emulators back when they were all the rage, or the GameCube a decade ago, but I'd kinda gotten the impression the late PS2 era had been a brick wall, with only weird specialty projects like Yuzu as successful exceptions that aimed for the low-hanging fruit and getting absolutely clobbered by lawfare. Hardware wise, I'd seen a million different Raspberry Pi compute stick shells, and just slapped the same code on a RaspPi I already had and considered RetroArch checked.
Nope. Gone are the dime-store-3d-print shells. Forget BCM2711s or RK3399 (... mostly). Even the Bricks built for gameboy-level emulation are running on more specialized and capable processors, and some of the higher-end machines can be comparable to desktop machines I would be pretty comfortable playing 2022 AAA-games on. Sure, Nintendo can cost the software developers or website hosts a pretty penny, but you don't even have to run to skeezy AliExpress offers to get giant deliveries of embarrassingly overt piracy... and maybe some software herpes. The PS3, despite its weirdo architecture, seems like it's actually working okay? And on things like the XBox, Microsoft cares so little about it that you can just rip software straight from an unmodded console, with nothing more specialized than a USB spinning rust drive. Who expected the day when M$ wasn't the bad guy when it came to archiving old games?just don't look at their OS. When you can't play something, it's usually a sign of serious software limits some nutjob is willing to work surprisingly hard to solve, or you're emulating a wii game with a prolonged jerkoff joke as a central game mechanic that doesn't translate well.
Now, there's a lot of sketch here. At the high end, you have fun questions like iffy USB-C-PD implementations and driver hell. More often, expect a ton of hardware that cycles in and out in months if not days, from a manufacturer that's apparently colorblind and depending on Kickstarter churn. Even when everything works out fine, commitment to the LGPL is more in theory than practice, and there's a lot of reason to suspect that the Snapdragon8gen2 chips were 'surplus' from conventional projects -- I dislike Qualcomm's resale policies enough to think that's a plus, but from a support and longevity perspective it's a red flag.
And, yeah, a lot of these come with just piles upon piles of piracy. Ostensibly, you could play native games (many newer devices are fairly fully-featured linux/android, albeit with all the !!fun!! involved since most of the cheaper ones are ARM). Ostensibly, you could just rip games you own or collect, and I'm enough of a hoarder collector that I've actually been able to do some of that, but in all honesty? They're built for piracy. You know it, I know it, most vendors are pretty unabashed about letting you pick how much piracy you want and know it, the less graymarket vendors having to explicitly warn you that they aren't doing the piracy for you know it.
There's an optimistic view that's kinda nice. Yeah, it's a little twisted to be so ruled by nostalgia that you're putting as much processing power into a 2002 handheld game as could run a 2022 AAA one. And if everybody could have just bought a 5 USD rip of great games like Grand Theft Auto 3 or Shadow of the Colossus or Okami and run them on their cell phone, we probably wouldn't have gotten remasters of them. But in turn, there's a ton of other games that will never show up again, or where they are remastered get butchered in the process, or get remastered for a console or environment that itself has a shelf life measured in months. The Baptists-and-Bootleggers of Obsessive Weirdos and Literal Thieves haven't just kept a lot of otherwise abandoned games archived and usually playable (oh boy Games for gofuckyourself Windows Live), but they've made a lot of equipment and play options that would otherwise not exist, even if that requires pretty dedicated design and engineering work. If it also means you can get an unlocked Android device that'll accept alternate bootloaders for less than the cost of last generations Nintendo handheld, I'm not gonna complain.
So I dunno. I'm still more of a keyboard-and-mouse gamer, but some of the options are looking pretty good when I'm away from my desk or my documentation or my reading list. And even for normal gaming time, I think it might be worth firing up Megaman Legends or Robot Alchemic Drive again.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
23hr ago
why not just blow it all out in a cocaine-and-hookers weekend
Because those are illegal, I don't know where I'd find them in my area, and don't have the money to afford them anyway?
and then end it with a 9mm breakfast?
Because I'd worry about missing the right spot, and ending up still alive but with seriously incapacitating brain damage — which is why I'm more likely to go with helium and an "exit bag" instead.
And as for why I don't do that, mostly because my family would get stuck with the bill for disposing of my corpse, which exceeds my (SSI-limited) net worth. Once my parents are both gone, though…
Now, you might argue that America's heart wasn't really in it. Is their heart going to be more in it when it's their own homeland they're burning and shelling?
"Outgroup vs. Fargroup" comes to mind here. Fighting a bunch of people on the other side of the world who you are somewhat sympathetic toward, versus fighting the useless, inbred, gap-toothed, room-temperature-IQ, religious fanatic, every -ist and -phobe, Klanazis that make up the hated enemy tribe?
Also, in the GWOT, America's military operated in a foreign land, while their entire support structure, industrial base, and their soldiers' friends and family were perfectly safe on the other side of an ocean.
Which means they had nothing to fear from giving up and going home. When "home" is where you're fighting, it's win-or-die, so the motivation is much stronger.
I don't remember where it was, but I remember a year or two ago reading an editorial online from a retired general, ostensibly about the possibility of civil war in the US (though he ultimately used it to lay out his — IMO ridiculous — position on counter-insurgency), where he gave this as one of the arguments as to why whichever side of a second civil war the military pics simply cannot lose — the US military, since the 20th century, has not been and cannot be defeated, the politicians have merely gotten tired and called it off; but since doing so in a civil war is suicide…
I hadn't heard that, but unless the baby is born in late spring or summer, a woman in America is expected to return to work within three months of giving birth. If she breaks her contract by resigning mid year, that isn't great for her record, though teaching tends towards chronic shortage, so she's likely to find another job sometime anyway.
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