Friday
gattsuru
1yr ago
Others I'd add:
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Rationalist an adherent (or some style of critic) of the philosophy established on LessWrong, originally focused on trying to develop a more accurate model of what is true through understanding available information and avoiding the various pitfalls newly being recognized by 1990s-2005-era social psychology. Not... very typically that rational, and very much not philosophical rationalism.
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Ratsphere, rationalist diaspora. A reader or commenter from LessWrong that started moving to other social media, typically in 2010-2014, or those adjacent to them, or adjacent to those adjacent to them. See here or here.
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Postrat or post-rationalist, someone that rejects the rationalist movement's interest in what is true as impossible, and instead prioritizes what is useful to believe. Usually part of the (twitter) rationalist diaspora. See example here.
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Tpot, usually lower-cased. 'That part of twitter', a mostly coastal techie group, some overlap with ratsphere. Largely an endonym. Example here.
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Litany of Tarski, a poem saying to want to know and believe things that are true, usually with the connotation that the true thing is depressing or unpleasant. See here.
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Conflict Theory and Mistake Theory, where Conflict Theory is the model that disagreements reflect two sides naturally opposed to each other who at best are negotiating over the division of spoils, while Mistake Theory is the model that each side disagrees about a question and could be persuaded. See example here or here. Quokka is largely a criticism of or self-identifier for mistake theorists and... I think we're at the point where there's not enough pure mistake theorists to have anything similar going the other way for conflict theorists.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I would also specify that it's gone well outside of communities focused on gender relationships, especially blackpill (see also here, here, here), but also whitepill (see also here) and more rarely bluepill (see also here).
Clearpill doesn't actually seem popular here (the only older ref is from a Moldbug piece?) or much of anywhere.
Pink, I don't think I've seen here, and it's not very common even in spheres that are about AMAB people being briar patched into dressing as women.
There is dogpill, as ChrisPrattAlphaRaptr points out, and grillpill, but those are probably at the point where it's a generic suffix.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
1yr ago
· Edited 1yr ago
I find myself single.
This was inevitable, and the writing was on the wall that the two of us weren't compatible, even if I loved her dearly right from the start.
Little fights would snowball into battles, she had a hair-trigger temper and you'd swear her name, which incidentally could have passed as Latina, made her one. As lovely as she could be, as smart and talented as she was, it wasn't meant to be.
I'm at fault. I'll gladly shoulder the majority of the burden for it all. I could make excuses about ADHD, depression, the enormous amount of stress I'm under as the knives chop away inexorably at the strands of the future, but for all that they're true excuses, I was a pretty crappy boyfriend. I'm very lucky I'm smart and funny enough, that I could make her laugh and temporarily forget my myriad flaws. It's not like I didn't care about her, even if I struggled to show it in the way she craved.
She'll be fine. She always was a fighter.
I think I'll be too. After all, this was a shared decision. Like two cacti hugging in the cold desert winds on a moonless night, the sweetness of the dripping nectar couldn't keep at bay the building pain from all the pricks and scabs we couldn't help but scratch at.
On to more practical things.
I've given enough (good) dating advice here that I know the ropes. Currently, work and exams makes even the apps appealing, for all that they're meticulously designed by psychologists (and the incentives of mammalian evolution) to be a gauntlet of suffering for the male of the species, all to squeeze out your hopes, dreams, and more importantly, money.
But I've aged like wine. I've got a dozen good pictures carefully curated. With a dog. In scrubs. With friends, so women can rest assured I'm not a psycho. In decent clothing and proper lighting. I might not be as handsome as my brother, but I'm certainly not repulsive either. Most importantly, I'm older, and for a man, that's a good thing, right till the male pattern baldness or the paunch hits. Two matches in less than two hours, whereas the last time I tried, as a med student, it took days or weeks.
I'd love to date more in person, but I'm not going to hit the clubs alone. Most of my friends have long since fled to fairer shores. Thankfully flirting with patients (or at least their family members, I don't swing towards 70 year old ladies with cancer) is not illegal in India, we haven't cucked our doctors that badly, but that's not really something I'm inclined to do either, let alone how fucking tired I am at work. Oh well, at least I know I can slide into DMs like I was lubed, 7 years of steady relationships don't lie about that. They didn't pick me for my sterling good looks after all.
But if anyone has any advice. I'm all ears. I'm tired of dishing it out and could actually use some myself.
Before anyone suggests the usual, I am, or intend to:
- Get a good haircut (already done).
- Hit the gym.
- Buy clothes? Nah, I haven't bought new ones in like a year, and I've got enough good fits to make it work.
Lawyer upfor our shared investment of a cellphone charger and a vape pod. Well, she does owe me a sizeable amount of money, but I trust she'll pay me back.
I'm tall, charming, with a beard that's far less scraggly after some (poorly adhered to) minoxidil, in a promising career (hahahaha), so please skip the kind of blue pills (psychiatric variant) you'd feed the dearly departed Skookum and the like.
Go on ahead, hit me with your best or worst. I have a beer in hand and a flint in the other to strike and light Tinder. I'm receptive. I have time to kill and the things I need to do can wait.
(The biggest motivator to study for me now has become the observed fact that hot young med students and interns love them an older Resident or Consultant. Time to grind and get that bag.)
cjet79
1yr ago
This is not too low effort, and please do not put culture war stuff in the friday fun thread.
On Friday, the USA's National Association of Realtors agreed to settle a big lawsuit (in which it lost a jury trial late last year). Starting in mid-July, sellers' agents will be permitted to list houses on NAR-controlled multiple-listing services (the databases from which Zillow and Redfin copy their information) without being forced to make a blanket offer to split their commissions with buyers' agents. This will make it much easier for buyers to hire their agents separately (rather than the current practice of having the buyer's agent hired by the seller), leading to lower buyer's-agent commissions. Alternatively, it will be much easier for buyers to imitate the standard practice in Britain and Australia, and hire real-estate attorneys for a flat fee rather than real-estate agents for a percentage commission. See these articles (1 2 3 4) for descriptions of how house buying works in Britain and Australia.
Bonus: Starting on page 106 of this PDF is the testimony of the plaintiffs' star witness, economist Craig Schulman. The meat is on pages 196–211. (Unfortunately, it seems that RECAP isn't set up to process trial transcripts.)
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1yr ago
Anyone who says bat is fucking retarded. I sincerely mean it from the bottom of my heart, how are you even allowed to vote?
Man, even for a Friday fun thread, chill out.
Total War: Warhammer 3
If anyone has a favorite faction they want me to try (as a total beginner) I’ll give it a shot this week and post updates next Friday.
I'm not very good at it. I usually do okay on Easy/Easy until I'm up against Skaven or a particularly well-defended city battle. Just picked up a bunch of DLCs for Steam's Spring Sale though, so looking forward to trying Chaos Dwarves (EDIT: tried these, way too complicated, will put them off until later), Malus Darkblade, or the Sisters of Twilight. Hopefully the next DLC actually changes some of the base mechanics of the seriously underpowered Empire, Dwarves, and Nurgle factions with balance/campaign mechanics tweaks and not just giving them 20 new units each.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Trans/queer; the new punk
A plague is corrupting the youth of Athens. Men dress like women, sport long, dyed hair and refuse to wrestle in the coliseum or participate in polite society. Women dress like men. Both mutilate their bodies to the consternation of their elders and abscond from their parents homes in droves.
I am, of course, talking about punks. And emos, goths and metalheads if I can lump everyone into the same bucket to make my life easier.
Having a fluorescent blue footlong mohawk, tattoos, piercings and a leather jacket made you eminently unemployable outside of menial service jobs and was the fashion equivalent of telling the world to go fuck itself. ‘Posers’ would get a tiny tattoo on their ankle or something and listen to the wrong music, then cover it up for their day job. Plenty of people will be nonbinary on the weekend and just pass as whatever gender they were assigned at birth Monday-Friday. 15 years ago, the mainstream was sharing cringe videos of emos and goths instead of the ‘it is ma’am’ person.
I believe that there are genuine trans people in the world who have always felt uncomfortable in their body. Numerous posts here have already described the rapid rise in trans youth so I won’t belabor the point, but my thesis (which will no doubt tank my career when this account is doxxed) is that a large fraction of these youth are protesting the gender binary and heteronormativity rather than experiencing a true, deep-seated gender identity different from what they were assigned at birth. A man wearing a dress, long hair or makeup is rebelling against arbitrary norms around clothing/fashion that evolved for a vastly different society with different needs. Spend some time on Feeld, okcupid or other dating apps (especially within the poly community), and you’ll see many people who identify as trans or queer and aren’t so much trying to pass as telling the system to go fuck itself by refusing to conform to gender norms.
Boomers and Gen Xers decrying trans youth and trans culture are Barbara Streisanding the phenomenon; the fact that you hate it is what makes it appealing to many kids in the first place! In the same way that being a punk is a nonissue today, the future of trans is becoming a minority of the population who wear the clothes that they want, use the bathrooms they want and nobody cares. Meanwhile, we’ll all be losing our minds about otherkin or pluralkin. Or maybe this guy. This isn’t to dismiss the harms that punks and anarchists may have caused in their time; I can think of a couple small-scale riots and businesses burned in my hometown during Mostly Peaceful demonstrations that got out of hand. The trans movement undoubtedly isn’t an unalloyed good and criticism will likely be valuable to reign in the excesses as it evolves into whatever the endgame is.
History may rhyme, but it’s true that it never directly repeats itself. The punk community, obviously, placed a large emphasis on music and art. While queercore is a thing, as was PWR BTTM pre-cancellation, the trans movement clearly isn’t centered on music in the same way. This could just be a shift in protest/underground culture, as neither punk nor metal carry the same bite that they used to - I saw Rancid about 10-15 years ago and even then no amount of cocaine could give them the energy they had in the 90s. Napalm Death was a hell of a time, but it hits a bit different when the entire crowd is in their 30s-50s instead of their teens. Kids are on their phones instead of listening to the radio, hanging out at the skate park and going to punk shows - as a result, protest culture just looks different than it used to, but I believe the trans movement are the ideological inheritors of the punk movement.
The other major difference, and one place where I expect the most pushback, is that punk was anti-authoritarian, anarchist and explicitly ungovernable. On the other hand, major media outlets, schools and ‘The Cathedral’ are explicitly pro-trans. I would argue that while the progressive activists are genuine they are vastly in the minority, and opposed by an equally loud minority with inverted views if not quite the same institutional reach. The majority in the center make pro-trans noises, but at the end of the day they aren’t going to date a trans person or wear clothes that don’t match their gender.
As an aside, if I can ramble for a bit - the corollary to Cthulhu swimming left is that youth crave rebellion and transgression, only to grow up and normalize whatever was shocking to their elders. Septum piercings and tattoos were ‘big deals’ growing up, whereas I have friends who are academics in good standing with visible tattoos and piercings. Going way back, lindy hop in the Savoy ballroom 12 was viewed as scandalous, whereas now it’s largely practiced by white retirees in their 60s-70s and millenial STEMlords who like dancing predetermined patterns. Elvis shocked the nation with gyrating hips in a performance tamer than 99% of the content on instagram. Punk and metal have vastly less appeal for Zoomers in the same way that the Beatniks and Hippies held no sway over the Millenials; each generation of youth pushes for progress and wants to do something transgressive. I’ll leave it to someone smarter than I to make the case that this freedom and spirit of rebellion is core to what makes America and the West great, but I do genuinely believe it.
Anyways. I, for one, can’t wait to see 60-70 year old millennials trying to dance like this. See you all grinding on the nursing home stripper poles in a couple decades.
Obligatory statement to head off some remarks: minors being able to medically transition against the wishes of their parents makes me deeply uncomfortable. I don’t support public school children being forced to attend drag queen story hour, but have no problem with people who want to bring their own children. Most other trans-associated culture war topics (pronouns, bathrooms, clothes, whatever) I'm fine with.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1yr ago
One fun and cheap pastime is converting books from print or PDF to HTML+CSS (using Markdown as an intermediary if you don't care enough to learn HTML+CSS). Imagine Distributed Proofreading (the input for Project Gutenberg), but entirely on your own terms, modifying the original text to suit your personal preferences.
If you care about providing a meaningful service to other people, then making illegal high-quality digital versions of older works that (1) still are under copyright but (2) have not been made legally available in electronic form by their publishers (examples: 1 2 3) may fit that criterion.
I haven't much experience with scout and church leaders though I also was a teenage admirer of John Carmack. I realize I knew very little about him until I listened to his four hour Lex interview
What makes him a good young role model? Even in a space like video games he can make a mark and be successful
- deeply throwing himself into his work; stories about how Michael Abrash would leave him at the office on Friday and come back on Monday and see that John had been there the whole weekend hacking away trying to optimize Quake
- shamelessly learning from every source possible (he mentioned consuming programming magazines and even reading ads for educational value)
- was not credentialed but he didn't let that stop him
- was actually kind of a young cyber-criminal (black hat hacker) but that didn't define his future
- doesn't let his obsession with nerdiness have him eschew physical fitness: he's also a fit and in-shape BJJ practitioner
- still ate pizza his whole life, every day, from Domino's
- presumably still found a happy healthy relationship with a woman and is a father that provides for his family and also spends time with them?
- mentions stuff about taking vacations to hotel rooms next to an airport just so he can get away and concentrate on his work undisturbed
- oh also bought himself Ferraris to play with after he became wealthy why not
Okay he seems pretty awesome. Someone kids could look up to.
Does this stuff make him a conservative male role model though?
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1yr ago
RE 1. I am not an extremely sophisticated investor. I generally buy and hold for 5+ years. Unless I have something I'd rather invest in, or the gains just get too rich (10x or so), I let things ride. I also tend to do this with my losses, since I know I'm not fast enough, or have enough inside information, to dip before things go south. So once I'm at the bottom, I figure I might as well ride it out, or save the losses for tax season to offset gains. Maybe this means I shouldn't have a self directed brokerage account at all, and if I ever dip below my 10% APY threshold I may consider that, but so far so good.
RE 2. You may be right about this one. I sold the first covered call, and my heart dipped when COIN went up enormously Friday evening and Monday morning. Turns out I might not have been as emotionally prepared to part with COIN @ 340 if it happened this early after all. Of course the price came back down, the call I sold is rapidly approaching worthlessness, down 85% from when I sold it, and it looks like I will escape the week a few hundred richer and with all my holdings in tact.
My whole reasoning behind attempting this is to keep it up with some regularity week to week, getting $100-200 here or there with some consistency. Sell calls that are at or above my strike price and only 4-5 days out, and just settle for whatever I can get for them. Paying for private school has been expensive and my monthly contributions to my brokerage account have dwindled precipitously. Selling covered calls seemed like a not terrible way to effectively goose my "contributions". But I may not have the emotional fortitude or sophistication for it after all.
We shall see what this Friday brings, and if I feel like repeating my efforts come Monday.
FtttG
1yr ago
The "radical fringe" which is neither
What the 2024 referendum says about modern Irish political alignments
I
Last Friday, Ireland held its fifth constitutional referendum is less than a decade. The referendum concerned two amendments to the Irish constitution which, if successful, stood to move Ireland in a dramatically more socially progressive direction.
The first proposed amendment (the "family amendment") concerns two clauses defining the family. As the constitution stood prior to the referendum, the family is defined as a natural primary and fundamental unit group of society, based on the legal institution of marriage. The constitution additionally pledges to protect the institution of marriage (on which families are based) from attack. The proposed wording would amend this so that families can be based on "durable relationships" in addition to just marriage.
The second proposed amendment (the "care amendment") concerns two clauses regarding the role of women in Irish society. The constitution acknowledges the contribution women make to the state within the home, and hence promises that the state shall "endeavour" to ensure that women are not obliged by economic necessity to earn a living and hence neglect their duties in the home. (These clauses have been widely glossed as the constitution asserting that women belong in the home, including by no less than government ministers.) The proposal is to replace these with a single clause reading: "The State recognises that the provision of care, by members of a family to one another by reason of the bonds that exist among them, gives to Society a support without which the common good cannot be achieved, and shall strive to support such provision."
This referendum marked the government's latest effort to "modernise" Ireland and bring its values more in line with those of our EU betters on the Continent. They touted the proposed amendments as feminist (no coincidence that the referendum was held on International Women's Day) and an important step towards making Ireland a more inclusive and tolerant society.
Sadly for the government, Ireland's resolutely backward, parochial, latently Catholic, Massey Ferguson-driving, GAA-playing population refused to play ball.1 Despite the backing of every major party and a raft of NGOs (who may well have been "encouraged" to endorse a Yes vote under public pressure), both proposals were rejected in a landslide, with the family and care proposals receiving a mere 32 and 26 per cent of the vote, respectively.
A wealth of reasons the proposed amendments proved so unpopular with voters have been proposed. Traditional feminists were worried that the government was angling to wash its hands of any commitment to providing financial support to mothers who don't work, particularly single mothers (of note is how the proposed amendment tied into Taoiseach2 Leo Varadkar's open admission that he doesn't think it's the state's responsibility to provide for people who are unable to provide for themselves).)). At least one article made hay of the fact that the proposed wording promises only that the government shall strive to support families in the provision of care (i.e. "we'll try to help out, but no promises") - although I'll note that the wording as it remains similarly states that the government shall endeavour to ensure that women don't have to neglect their duties in the home by reasons of economic necessity. One could persuasively argue that this is a much of a muchness.
Meanwhile, gender-critical groups were deeply suspicious of the government's desire to remove the words "woman" and "mother" from the constitution entirely. Social conservatives were concerned that acknowledging that families can be based on "durable relationships" might result in legal recognition of polycules, or even polygamy. Anti-immigration activists argued that a Yes vote would result in increased immigration from overseas (I confess I don't quite get the reasoning on this last point, and it seemed like a knowing attempt to sow FUD by piggybacking on widespread anti-immigration sentiment).
We could talk about which of the above factors were most important for the No side until the cows come home, but for now I'd like to talk about what the result of the referendum means for Irish political alignments more broadly.
II
Roughly fifteen years ago, a new ideology began making dramatic inroads into societies across the Anglosphere and beyond. In a remarkably short space of time, this faction has achieved enviable success in colonising existing institutions and political parties, forcing them to, at the bare minimum, pay lip service to various components of their worldview. This faction is variously referred to as "wokeness" or "social justice politics" or any other of a number of terms. It's a strange new movement indeed: a movement with whacky policy prescriptions ranging from the ludicrously utopian to almost impossibly trivial and petty; which came packaged with a unique and abstruse vocabulary originating in the academy, and wholly impenetrable to those not in the know (possibly by design); which becomes outraged by successive attempts to even apply a neutral label to the faction; which markets itself as leftist, and yet is eagerly co-signed by neoliberal capital-friendly politicians and multi-national corporations (while more traditional socialists often react to it with a blend of bemusement, exasperation and horror).
One can conceive of the woke faction as an uneasy coalition made up of woke leftists and woke liberals. The leftists are ornery, confrontational types who have no interest in playing nice or being respectable, know what they're saying is unpopular and don't care who they piss off, because they're largely people with nothing to lose (more on this in a future post). The liberals, by contrast, are agreeable to a fault, keen on "reading the room", obsessed with respectability politics, desperate to avoid being seen to make a fuss.
When woke leftists encounter public disagreement with their worldview, their default tactic is to dismiss their interlocutor using one or more of the following descriptors: "alt-right", "Nazi", "neo-Nazi", "racist", "white supremacist" "misogynistic", "transphobic" and (by far the most popular term in Ireland over the last five years) "far-right". This tactic is essentially impossible to refute, as it's ultimately a meaningless (and masturbatory) debate over the definitions of words. If I say I don't think it's appropriate to house convicted male rapists with intact genitalia in women's prisons, and a woke person says that I'm "far-right" because only a "far-right" person would say such a thing - well, this is vacuously true, based on the stipulative definition you've just assigned that term.3
By contrast, when woke liberals encounter public disagreement with their worldview, their preferred tactic is to insist that the vast majority of people already agree with the opinion in question, and the only people voicing disagreement are a "vocal minority" or "radical fringe" of extremists who've become radicalised as a result of consuming too much Fox News and Telegram. This is an essential tool for dispelling the cognitive dissonance inherent to being a liberal in a woke space.
Prior to the woke era, liberals largely endorsed safe, middle-of-the-road political opinions which could be presumed to enjoy a high level of popular support among most audiences. But as a result of the woke colonisation of traditionally liberal spaces, liberals are now expected to recite a collection of opinions and slogans which the average member of the public finds bizarre and alienating - or else. Alas, liberals are temperamentally disinclined to express opinions which most people disagree with - opinions which, if taken to their logical conclusions, imply that "almost everyone you encounter in contemporary society is a bad person". The last thing a liberal wants to do is seen to be stepping on people's toes.
Their "solution" is to dutifully mouth the unpopular opinions while loudly asserting that the opinions in question are actually popular, and studiously avoiding any and all evidence to the contrary. The minute a woke leftist says something radical and outrageous, the woke liberal will be on hand to sanewash it, massage the sentiment, assure the general public that "he didn't really mean that, it's just rhetorical hyperbole". But sometimes no amount of sanewashing will do anything to make woke opinions more palatable to the mainstream, which explains woke liberals' irritating habit of talking around opposing opinions by labelling them as "far-right", "transphobic" or similar without plainly stating what those opinions are and allowing the reader to draw their own conclusions.4
Pay no attention to that opinion behind the curtain
To be fair, sometimes liberals are correct in their assesssment that only a vocal minority are opposed to this or that policy. Actual Irish far-right parties are as marginalised as they come, without a single elected representative between them; progressive policies like legal abortion and gay marriage enjoy broad popular support; rates of religiosity and Catholic observance are in freefall. But on other occasions, this assessment is significantly wide of the mark.
III
The results of this referendum serve as a timely confirmation of what many already suspected: many woke policies are profoundly unpopular among the Irish electorate, and can usually only make their way into legislation under cover of darkness. The people of Ireland were asked point blank if they believe that families based on marriage are just as valid as families based on "durable relationships" (which could mean practically anything: cohabiting straight couples with children who are too lazy or stubborn to formally tie the knot but want all the ancillary benefits of doing so anyway; polycules made up of one woman and five men; polygamous relationships in which one man has a harem of brides). By a staggering margin, the people of Ireland responded - no, they are not. Their attitudes towards "durable relationships" now join trans issues and immigration as examples of topics on which the median Irish voter deviates quite sharply from woke orthodoxy.
When a woke leftist calls you far-right for expressing an opinion which would have been seen as a bog-standard liberal opinion five or ten years ago - well, no one wins a fight about the dictionary definitions of words, but everyone loses. But when a woke liberal argues that such-and-such an opinion is only held by a vocal minority of radical extremists, I think it's incumbent on people to retort: no, actually most Irish people don't believe "durable relationships" are essentially the same thing marriages, and they made that quite clear when they went to the polls in their tens of thousands. We're the mainstream and you're the radical fringe, the ones who hold strange and unpopular opinions they absorbed from consuming American media. Woke liberals are welcome to believe that their opinions are morally correct. They should no longer be permitted to believe, contrary to all evidence, that those opinions are also popular among Irish people.
Now of course, we shouldn't read too much into this referendum in isolation. Turnout was a mere 44%, shockingly low compared to the gay marriage and abortion referenda which both achieved a turnout in excess of 60%. It's not impossible that there are half a million+ voters out there who would have voted Yes to both amendments but didn't bother. Maybe the fine poly people of Ireland simply couldn't find the time to get down to the polls amidst their busy schedules of posting in r/relationshipanarchy and self-flagellating over their toxic jealousy. But I can't help but admit to a certain scepticism on this point. The impression I get is of a populace who were overwhelmingly either indifferent or actively opposed to the proposed amendments, and certainly not "confused".
I also want to reiterate the point that the fact that wokeness is unpopular among voters doesn't mean it's wrong - that would be committing the exact same logical fallacy in the opposite direction. I'm only pleading with liberal journalists and politicians to acknowledge that many of the policies they're advocating are deeply unpopular among voters, and adjust their tactics accordingly.
IV
With such a striking landslide of a result, one can't help but wonder why the government even put the issue to vote in the first place. Wasting €23 million on a referendum rejected by 70% of the country is a national embarassment, and with such a skewed outcome it ought to have been obvious to the government months in advance that neither amendment had any hope of passing. Two explanations for why the referendum went ahead in spite of this occur to me. Perhaps the government is made up of woke liberals wilfully ignoring all of the evidence as to how unpopular the proposed amendments were outside of a specific social bubble. Alternatively, they thought that a given density of trendy buzzwords like "inclusive" and "misogyny" would be sufficient to trick the public into voting for a referendum which was not at all what it appeared to be. With all the talk of how "confusing" the proposed amendments were, it looks like the latter might be the case - isn't it interesting how voters are only ever "confused" when they give the wrong result? But regardless, it seems this referendum was only put to the vote because the government is wilfully ignorant, or deceitful and underhanded. Not a great look either way.
The usual fingers for the failure of the referendum to pass will be pointed. Government ministers will insist that the proposed changes were moderate and incremental, and were unfairly mischaracterised as radical and sweeping. Some journalist somewhere is bound to argue that the negative result came about as a result of nebulously defined "foreign interference". I'm sure Varadkar will eventually claim that a Yes-Yes vote would have been secured if only there had been more robust legal powers in place to combat social media "disinformation" in the months prior, using the failure as an opportunity to finally get his beloved hate speech bill over the line, it having languished in the lower house for nearly a year.
But on some level, Varadkar and his cronies knows what everyone else knows: the Irish public for the most part find wokeness bizarre and alienating, and no amount of shaming them, labelling them far-right or telling them they're in the minority in their opinions will get them to change their minds (even if they might pretend to have done so in public). Either come up with more persuasive arguments for why wokeness is right, or stop pushing it altogether.
1 A resolutely backward, parochial, latently Catholic, Massey Ferguson-driving, GAA-playing population which gave the nod to both gay marriage and abortion by popular mandate in the last decade, by a 60%+ majority in both cases - but let's not let that pair of inconvenient facts disrupt the narrative we've concocted.
2 Prime minister.
3 Strictly speaking, it isn't even necessarily a contradiction to assert that an opinion held by the overwhelming majority of a given populace is "far-right": even if this description isn't true of numerous opinions in modern Ireland, it was uncontroversially true in Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany or countless other examples.
4 Sometimes one even gets the impression of the liberal and the leftist living side-by-side in the same individual, occupying opposing hemispheres of the brain, the apologist and the revolutionary. These contrasting perspectives allow a woke person to seamlessly hop back and forth between
- everyone in Ireland is already woke: it's only a vocal minority of far-right agitators - those dastardly Healy-Raes! - preventing it from being fully implemented
and
- racism and misogyny are baked into Irish society, incrementalist reform won't do a damn thing, we've got to rip this up root and branch
as the moment requires. Scott Alexander detected some of this tension between two fundamentally incompatible worldviews in the film Don't Look Up.
BurdensomeCount
—Your em dash is showing...
1yr ago
You don't give the sixty lashes all in one row. Six lashes every Friday until the sentence is discharged, and he is kept in prison until that happens.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
Ah - the problem there is that you were doing proper HIIT, not that you weren't. If you're wanting to physically develop to the point where running isn't miserable every time out, it requires lot of easy effort, not lots of high effort. Elite athletes that put in huge miles are typically running about 80% of it as a fairly low effort. The majority of aerobic fitness gains come from relatively easy effort, with higher effort providing additional VO2Max, lactic threshold, or neuromuscular power (depending on the workout). For me, a typical week during a non-marathon training block is something like:
- Monday - Recovery day: Easy 45 minute bike ride, easy 4 mile run (9:00/mile pace)
- Tuesday - Track intervals: Warmup (3 miles, some strides mixed in), 12x400m (start at 10K pace, progress to 3K pace by last interval, 400m easy jog recoveries between), cooldown (2 miles easy)
- Wednesday - Recovery run: 6 miles easy (8:30/mile pace)
- Thursday - General aerobic: 10 miles at moderate effort (7:40/mile pace)
- Friday - Lactic Threshold: Warmup (3 miles, some strides mixed in), 3x2 miles@LT (6:00/mile pace, 2 minutes float recovery at 7:00/mile pace), cooldown
- Saturday - General aerobic: 8 miles at moderate effort (7:40/mile pace, but feel free to pick it up if I feel good)
- Sunday - Long run: 14 miles @ moderate effort (7:40/mile, likely to run harder the last few miles)
If you've developed the fitness for it, all of the recovery and general aerobic feels relaxing and not very difficult. Pop in a podcast, spend an hour outside, drink a beer when I get home. The workouts are hard but satisfying.
For someone starting out, I would basically suggest zero interval work. Accumulating base mileage just has a much larger impact on aerobic fitness with much less risk of injury and burnout. If someone isn't consistently running ~30-40 miles per week, they will probably gain more running fitness from adding more time and mileage than from running harder more frequently.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
1yr ago
sorry, i meant to post this in culture war. I originally made a brief post and then i kept adding to it and hit submit before realizing i had posted it in the Friday thread.
Primaprimaprima
I am trying so hard not to say the MBTI type of everyone I reply to
1yr ago
[comic sans]UAP DISCLOSURE UPDATES[/comic sans]
The mood in the UFO community has been pessimistic since Schumer's UAPDA was gutted at the end of last year, and the release of Volume I of AARO's Historical Record Report today isn't helping:
Broadly, the new Volume I report states that AARO found no verifiable evidence that any reported UAP sighting has represented extraterrestrial activity, that the U.S. government or private industry has ever had access to technology of non-human origin, or that any information was illegally or inappropriately withheld from Congress.
Officials highlight multiple examples and explanations of government accounts, programs and existing technologies associated with UAP claims.
“AARO assesses that alleged hidden UAP programs either do not exist or were misidentified authentic national security programs unrelated to extraterrestrial technology exploitation,” Phillips said in the briefing.
The report affirms the theory advanced publicly by former AARO director Sean Kirkpatrick that rumors of US government involvement with recovered alien technology were originated by a small group of government insiders who ultimately lacked verifiable evidence to substantiate their claims. Furthermore, these rumors may have been grounded in short-lived and/or proposed programs that actually kinda were meant to study aliens, even though none of these programs ever actually found any aliens:
KONA BLUE was brought to AARO’s attention by interviewees who claimed that it was a sensitive DHS compartment to cover up the retrieval and exploitation of “non-human biologics.” KONA BLUE traces its origins to the DIA-managed AAWSAP/AATIP program, which was funded through a special appropriation and executed by its primary contractor, a private sector organization. DIA cancelled the program in 2012 due to lack of merit and the utility of the deliverables. [...] When DIA cancelled this program, its supporters proposed to DHS that they create and fund a new version of AAWSAP/AATIP under a SAP. This proposal, codenamed KONA BLUE, would restart UAP investigations, paranormal research (including alleged “human consciousness anomalies”) and reverse-engineer any recovered off-world spacecraft that they hoped to acquire. This proposal gained some initial traction at DHS to the point where a Prospective Special Access Program (PSAP) was officially requested to stand up this program, but it was eventually rejected by DHS leadership for lacking merit.
Most sane people would be content to leave things here.
Nonetheless.
There are multiple tantalizing loose ends in this saga that remain unresolved. After a classified briefing in January, multiple members of Congress indicated that they learned information that substantiated the claims brought forward by David Grusch in June about a secret UFO reverse engineering program. Immediately after the briefing, Republican Rep. Tim Burchett stated "I think everybody left there thinking and knowing that Grusch is legit" and Democrat Rep. Jared Moskowitz stated "Based on what we heard many of Grusch claims have merit!". The "skeptical" interpretation of these remarks would be that only some of Grusch's claims have merit, namely the more mundane claims about the DoD's misuse of funds and the personal reprisals against him, while the claims about UAP reverse engineering remain unsubstantiated. Regardless of what the appropriate interpretation is, I think that the full contents of the January briefing should be declassified and made public so that we can decide for ourselves.
We also know for a fact that many photos and videos relating to UAP incidents exist and remain classified. A recent FOIA request revealed details about a USAF pilot's encounter with a UAP, and it included the pilot's drawing of the object, but we weren't allowed to see the video:
The pilot managed to gain radar lock on the UAP and obtain a screen capture of the object, while the remaining three were only detected by radar. Notably, upon approaching within 4,000 feet of the lead UAP, the pilot’s radar malfunctioned and remained disabled for the rest of the mission, with post-mission investigations failing to conclusively diagnose the fault.
The documents also include a drawing of the UAP, providing a visual representation of only a part of the pilot’s encounter.
However, a responsive video related to the incident was withheld in full under Exemption (b)(1), which protects information deemed critical to national defense or foreign policy and properly classified under an Executive order. This video was not previously mentioned by Gaetz, and it is unclear if Gaetz had seen the video, or if the image he did see was a screen grab from it.
The reference to Gaetz here is due to remarks that Rep. Matt Gaetz made in July to the effect that he had seen an image of a UAP that seemed to demonstrate "technology that we don't posses anywhere in our arsenal, and none of our adversaries posses either". It's unclear to me if the case Gaetz was referring to is identical to this case that was uncovered by the FOIA request, but regardless, I would advocate for this video and for the image that Gaetz saw to be declassified and released to the public.
It may be surprising to people who haven't closely followed this story, but there actually is a culture war angle here.
Redditors with a vested interest in UAP disclosure have become uneasy over the fact that the Congressional effort for transparency has been spearheaded by Republicans of a decidedly MAGA variety (Burchett, Luna, Gaetz), and the few Democrats involved (Moskowitz, and to some degree AOC) have been generally more reserved and tepid in their support, or have simply withdrawn from the issue altogether over the last few months. This has fueled concerns that everyone has been swindled into supporting a "fringe right-wing conspiracy theory"; there's a desperate plea for more people with respectable left-wing credentials to come forward and lend credibility to the movement.
Which has me wondering: I think it's clear that the whole idea of a "conspiracy theory" has become firmly associated with the right. But is there any validity to this? Are people on the right more prone to believing in conspiracy theories? And if so, is this a recent historical development, or does this reflect something that's more deeply-rooted in the right-wing personality?
To be clear, I'm using the term "conspiracy theory" in the most neutral way possible, even though it's typically used as a pejorative. Even though I'm (somewhat) sympathetic to the possibility that the US government actually has concealed evidence of extraterrestrial life, that belief is, in the most literal sense, a conspiracy theory: it necessarily depends on the allegation that certain individuals conspired together in secret. The same goes for other popular beliefs on the right, like the allegations about improprieties in the 2020 presidential election. Even though I'm relatively neutral about the truth of those claims, it's hard to deny that they literally do constitute a conspiracy theory.
Alex Jones? Yeah, I'd say he's a conspiracy theorist. If you bring up Davos or the UN in any right-wing circle? Someone will probably insist that they're conspiring at some point.
Again, I don't view any of these claims as pejorative because I have no trouble thinking that some conspiracy theories might simply be true! I reject the Generalized Anti-Conspiracy Principle; I've never heard a convincing argument that made me think that substantial conspiracies are impossible, or that it would be impossible to get people to keep a secret for long enough (obviously some people can keep some things secret some of the time, otherwise your bank would have leaked your SSN by now).
For historical examples, many people would point to conspiracies in fascist states about ethnic minorities, although this would have to be counterbalanced by potential left-wing conspiracy theories: the paranoia about counter-revolutionaries in communist states and during the French Revolution, and potentially the foundations of Marxism itself (is it a "conspiracy" to say that the capitalists run everything?).
I do have to wonder if the tendency among right-leaning people to be more religious primes them to be more accepting of the possibility of unseen forces acting in the world. A surprising number of people in the UAP space have a Christian background (including certain highly-placed people in government), in spite of the general perception that belief in extraterrestrials would be incompatible with religious faith.
stormcrow
1yr ago
Hong Kong
The slow but inexorable march toward the complete indistinguishability of Hong Kong from any other mainland China city continues: Hong Kong unveils its second national security law, aligning city more closely with mainland China
The proposed law, while somewhat similar to western measures on its face includes broad definitions for purported national security concerns. Penalties for violation can include up to life in prison.
Of note, this was initially proposed in 2003 and sparked the massive scale protests then. Full text of the proposed article here.
Ireland
The arson attacks have died down (barring one seemingly apolitical attempt to burn down 5 shops in one day in Cork city) and the government has hardened their attitude somewhat towards the abuses of the asylum system, sending one man to prison and arresting dozens of others for showing up at Dublin airport without a passport and promising to resume deportations of failed asylum seekers on chartered flights (the covid response involved putting a moratorium on deportations).
I'm a bit late with this news but it turns out the man charged with setting fire to a Luas tram during the Dublin riot is a member of the National Party, so there is some evidence to the claims that far-right agitators are taking advantage of these protests to commit crimes. Stirring up violence is about all the National Party seems capable of, right now there are two self-proclaimed leaders of the party since Justin Barrett was ousted as party leader (something he denies) after a controversy over a large amount of stolen gold and a police investigation into who actually owns it.
Another slightly out of date headline is that the number of asylum seekers without state provided accommodation broke the 1,000 figure last month, but given the rate of increase it is likely still higher today:
On Friday 9 February, the figure passed 800 for the first time, the following Friday it passed 900, and today, one week on, it has passed 1,000.
Many of these asylum seekers have pitched tents outside the International Protection Office and are protesting the breach of their human rights given the sometimes freezing temperatures and constant rain. It has been the case for a while now that if you show up in Ireland claiming asylum that you will be sleeping on the street, but that doesn't seem to be much of a deterrent.
plural
1yr ago
Just chiming in to say you're not crazy and I remember that as well. I don't know if he ever actually got unbanned but I do remember someone saying they would unban him and then ban him again if he started only making posts about how hard it is to date women. It was in a friday fun thread.
astrolabia
1yr ago
I have nothing to add, but just wanted to say that I appreciate the writeup since I am in a pretty similar situation to you (pre-adderall). I actually have a stash that a colleague gave me, but haven't experimented with it yet because I'm expecting pretty much exactly the outcome you've had so far. Maybe the solution is to just take it on Fridays only?
Tyre_Inflator
1yr ago
Sir, this is the Friday Fun thread, not the Monday Man-Made Horrors Beyond Your Comprehension thread.
I had originally posted this in the Friday fun thread but it turns out that it was killing the vibe in there. Not sure what I was thinking. Anyway...
Note: I will completely qualify Portugal Europe and Portland Oregon in this article because they're easy to mix up.
Is liberalism peaking in Oregon?
In 2020, the state of Oregon passed a referendum, ballot Measure 110, which decriminalized all drugs(!) with a vote of 58% in favor.
Voters in Oregon (such as myself) believed this was the path to enlightened drug policy, being informed by the revered Portugal Europe model. Tacked onto the referendum was a bit of social justice theory as well: the police would be required to document in detail the race of anyone they stopped from now on for any reason. To ensure the police weren't disproportionately harassing the 2.3% of the population that's black.
As an occasional drug enjoyer, I do find it a relief to wander the streets of Portland Oregon squirting ketamine up my nostrils like I'm a visionary tech CEO without fear of police. But in broad strokes it appears to be a disaster.
Indeed, the ensuing data was an almost perfect A/B test, the kind you'd run with no shame over which kind of font improved e-commerce site checkout conversions.
By 2023, Oregon's drug overdose rate was well outpacing the rest of the country, so much so that the police officers regularly Narcan with them and revive people splayed out in public parks. Sometimes the same person from week to week. It's true this coincides with the fentanyl epidemic, which could confound the data and have bumped up overdoses everywhere but that wouldn't explain alone why deaths have especially increased in Oregon. The timing fits M110.
https://www.axios.com/local/portland/2024/02/21/fentanyl-overdose-rate-oregon-spikes
Oregon's fatal fentanyl overdose rate spiked from 2019 to 2023, showing the highest rate of increase among U.S. states, according to The Oregonian's crunching of new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
At some point someone decided to compare notes with Portugal Europe's system. Some stark differences!
https://gooddrugpolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/PortugalvOregon1.pdf
Briefly, Portugal Europe uses a carrot and stick model with a lot of negative incentive, whereas Oregon just kinda writes a $100 ticket and suggests calling a hotline for your raging drug problem maybe.
In the first 15 months after Measure 110 took effect, state auditors found, only 119 people called the state’s 24-hour hotline. That meant the cost of operating the hotline amounted to roughly $7,000 per call. The total number of callers as of early December of last year had only amounted to 943.
The absence of stick appears to not be very effective in encouraging users to seek treatment.
Are the kids having fun at least? https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/31/health/portland-oregon-drugs.html (paywall bypass: https://archive.ph/fHxWk)
“Portland [Oregon] is a homeless drug addict’s slice of paradise,” said Noah Nethers, who was living with his girlfriend in a bright orange tent on the sidewalk against a fence of a church, where they shoot and smoke both fentanyl and meth.
That's the brightest part of the article. The rest is pretty depressing and sad and sickening and worrisome.
After a few years of this, the Oregon legislature yesterday finished voting to re-criminalize drugs.
The NYT again https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/01/us/oregon-drug-decriminalization-rollback-measure-110.html (paywall bypass: https://archive.ph/3zksH)
Several prominent Democrats have expressed support for a rollback, including Mike Schmidt, a progressive prosecutor in the Portland area. After the decriminalization initiative passed in 2020, Mr. Schmidt implemented its provisions early, saying it was time to move past “failed practices” to “focus our limited law enforcement resources to target high-level, commercial drug offenses.”
But he has reassessed his position, he said in an interview this week. The proliferation of fentanyl requires a new approach that treats addiction as a health issue while holding people accountable, he said. The open drug use downtown and near parks and schools has made people feel unsafe, Mr. Schmidt said.
“We have been hearing from constituents for a while that this has been really detrimental to our community and to our streets,” he said. Mr. Schmidt said the new bill still prioritizes treatment and uses jail as a last resort. That, he said, could ultimately become the model Oregon offers to states around the country.
The governor has indicated that she would sign.
Critics are out in force, arguing that the legislature overrode the will of voters (remember it was passed by referendum) and that the state sabotaged the program by not efficiently distributing treatment resources to addicts. This poster believes the low uptake and missing negative incentives prove that drug harm reduction is not primarily about access to treatment, but about incentive not to use. I do sympathize that better public services and addiction resources that people actually trusted would help, but fentanyl complicates the situation substantially. People need to hit bottom before they seek help (or so goes the popular saying) but fentanyl is so potent and unpredictable that they're dying of an unexpected OD before they find themselves at bottom, ready to seek change.
Frankly, I'm surprised Oregon repealed this so quickly. Has liberalism peaked in Oregon?
As someone who voted for the referendum back in 2020, I'm a little sad that some of the overdose deaths are on my hands. Kind of. Like 1 millionth of the overdose deaths perhaps. It's good to run experiments though, right? This was a pretty good experiment. We at least have an upper bound on how liberal a drug policy we should pursue.
I believe this shows Oregon is not quite as ideologically liberal as previously led to believe. Or, at least, not anymore.
Yeah, men (sons) have the burden of performance. Women (daughters) cannot fail; they can only be failed.
Just existing can be enough for a daughter to retain her father's love, not so much for a son: "Sons are expected to have agency, force of will, ambition. They fail... For Tony Soprano, Bobby Bacala, Johnny Sacs: their girls are their princesses. Forever. Even as they grow up and go to college or get married — they’re daddy’s little girl. If they do something career focused, it’s window dressing or status points... But nevertheless [sons are] expected to win. Daughters are not. Daughters are only there to be loved."
Sure, there are some failure conditions that would apply to both sons and daughters (e.g., becoming a street junkie), and some of the most devastating ways a parental heart can be broken is by way of a daughter to her father, but the general set of failure conditions for a son is much larger than those for a daughter. If you're an M&A Managing Director at an investment bank, your son who became a school teacher is a failson. Your daughter who became a school teacher is just a daughter. Failson is much more of a thing than faildaughter, just as #GirlPower is much more of a thing than #GuyPower, #GirlBoss more of a thing than #GuyBoss.
This reminds me of @Folamh3's comment from a few months ago, although I would add a woman/daughter being pleasant, agreeable, talkative, and amiable can be optional in such circumstances:
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