site banner
Hour Day Week Month All
Hot Bump Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Advanced search parameters (with examples): "author:quadnarca", "domain:reddit.com", "over18:true"

Showing 25 of 110698 results for

domain:archive.ph

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

Great point re: average age of first marriage, never considered that

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

I like this analysis and I agree with your commentary

My point was embracing "Tell them not to have premarital sex." is a method that won't work, and thus, is silly to endorse

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

I mean okay?

Any proposed policy or solution that requires massive social change to work isn't a very useful proposal, but it's a nice dream I guess

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

I don't think that it was only in that specific context (and a fair amount of things that we take for granted about the Nazi ideology was also at least partly about answering a specific context, such as their particular attempts to appeal to the working class in the specific context of a threat of Marxist working-class rebellion). The Nazis had a mission to combat traditional religious morality and advance a more... nature-focused sort of an understanding of various things, such as sexual relations.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

Nobody has ever called a wanted 8 week old fetus anything other than a baby, unless it already had a nickname.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

Abstinence-only-until-marriage sex ed is unlikely to work well in a society where average age of first marriage is 30+ years.

It may work in a society where people get married when they are 16-18 years old, but it would require radical changes to other load bearing parts of cultural infrastructure. (Subsidies to colleges contingent on college as maximally family friendly and perhaps even maximally singles unfriendly?)

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

Googling "American lawyer average IQ" gives various estimates in the 115-125 range, with comments that successful lawyers (white-shoe partners, lawprofs, federal judges) are mostly going to be 130+.

I am pretty confident Sotomayor is in the 115-130 range - above average for traffic court lawyers, but well below the average federal judge. KBJ is even dumber than her. Kagan, Alito, Roberts, Kav, Barrett and Gorsuch are all smart enough to be e.g. High Court judges in England. I don't have an estimate on Thomas because so much of what he writes is easy dissents (or increasingly, concurrences) where he applies his simple but wrong (at least according to the majority and stare decisiis) law to the facts.

I suspect Alito is the smartest justice, but it isn't obvious because he is also the most partisan of the smart justices and partisanship makes you act dumber that you are.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

So what do you do? You target the unsympathetic leeches like single guys age 29 playing lots of COD, because those are the cuts you CAN make.

You are insufficiently cynical here. You target the unsympathetic leeches publicly in order to maintain support, and then cut Medicaid for everyone in a bill you don't give your own backbenchers time to read. 29yo single guys playing COD don't consume a lot of expensive healthcare (and when they do it is an ER visit after a car crash - which will end up as an uncollected bill for the hospital if Medicaid doesn't pay) - there is no way you are getting the size of Medicaid cuts the GOP are looking for without taking healthcare away from people who are actually sick, and the people writing the legislation know this.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

My claim is that anyone who says "we should simply tell them to not have sex" as a method of preventing unwanted babies is being willfully ignorant of the fact it's been conclusively demonstrated not to work

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

This was in the fairly specific context of a society with a female-skewed prime-age population (due to the extreme and unusually battlefield-only lethality of WW1) and a strong monogamy norm. The trad Christian approach was to put the surplus women in all-female communities under religious supervision. The effective pro-natalist approach was to support the surplus women in single motherhood. Of course, under the actual trad rules of large-scale warfare, the surplus German women would have been second wives of the victorious British (if they were lucky) or French (if not) troops.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

That does seem plausible, although a bit too narrow

But also humans like to have sex so if you tell them "don't have sex, that is all" then they won't listen to you and won't use birth control they're unaware exists

I tried skimming a few papers but figuring out which states the data came from was a pain in the ass so I gave up, happy to both walk away feeling like we're right

Wellness Wednesday for June 18, 2025

10+ years ago I fully memorized some fun complex rap verses, maybe a dozen or so, from stuff like blackalicious. Rather than any kind of parlor trick (people actually find it more annoying than memorized poetry), it was more just out of curiosity of how hard it would be. Each verse took maybe a few hours of intentional repetition, then sleeping on it, and then correcting mistakes on day 2, and it's done.

And I'm surprised that they've all stuck in my brain forever, but in a particular way: I may have to look up the first line, if I can't remember it. But then it all works as a chain, where every line leads to the next automatically. So the only problem is if there are repeated lines of words in the piece, where you can jump to the wrong spot afterward if you're not putting in more effort to think ahead of time. I guess the other surprise was that speed doesn't matter, and that rapping it all faster is maybe even easier than letting it breathe in some pleasant recitation.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

I agree, which is why I didn't raise the issue or make an argument based off it. Eliot did, and did so as part of a wave of next-day response posts to dismiss objectors. The 'I can tell your post didn't resonate with anyone else' only works as a dismissal if a lack of 'resonance' is indicative of quality.

I am quite happy to agree that voting is tangential to quality. I also agree with you that it is 100% indicative of agreement/disagreement. An exceptionally high degree of agreement is the evidence of 'resonance' that makes eliot's attempted engagement flex, well, eyebrow worthy.

After all, if there's one thing more cringe than a dude-bro conspicuously flexing how they can pick up heavy weights, it is someone trying to do the same with light weights. It is all of the same arrogance, but none of the capacity.

Pokémon for Unrepentant Sociopaths: A Review of Reverend Insanity

Doesn't Fang Yuan start beating up all his classmates for money somewhere in the first 50 chapters? That seems to go a bit beyond regular self-respect to me.

And an RPG where the maximum character level is 10 would be pretty good if the progression was appropriately paced, with tiers of power between those levels according to your gear, specialization, etc; with the highest level being not a guarantee but an achievement, something akin to beating Hades on maximum Heat. Dungeons and Dragons and the computer games derived from it have the maximum level 20, and in most IRL games, players only really reach level 10.

FWIW, if you think the progression is too simple I think, as much as I hate to resort to that webnovel trope, you haven't read far enough. It should be cleared up fairly soon how numerous the barriers towards maxing out are. But maybe I'm just not burned out on progression fantasy with 10 million billion power tiers.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

Medicaid is for single mothers with small children who are just trying to make it. It's not for 29-year-old males sitting on their couch playing video games.

Single mom is much more likely to be a dem voter. Republicans doing the opposite of patronage.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

Which men are we talking about? The ones in government sinecures, sure. I don't feel any gender solidarity with those.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

How is convincing western populations not to do this going?

You say this as if there is some consensus effort to try to convince them of this. The reality is that for quite a while now, the dominant consensus has been trying to accomplish the opposite. Unless you think this is just a fully-general argument against any sort of minority view. Like, communism must be wrong, not because it's conceptually wrong or anything, but because it hasn't convinced enough westerners to be communist, for example. This seems like a very strange claim.

Pokémon for Unrepentant Sociopaths: A Review of Reverend Insanity

I've always interpreted the djinn concept in a slightly different way; Even if you wish for something mostly benign, or which at least can be trivially granted in a desirable way, such as getting lots of gold, they will frequently fuck you over anyway, by actively contriving the wish in such a way that it becomes undesirable. The lesson, to me, was thus more about how a servant who is genuinely, fundamentally more powerful than you - even if the master-servant relationship is magically enforced! - is never truly just subservient. Especially if they are also smarter than you and can thus find loopholes in almost any wish you formulate, no matter how carefully.

However, as you point out, having limitless ambition and no moral compass means there is simply no pleasant natural ending state. It's just a permanent struggle until you're dead, or everyone else is. So even without a malicious spirit, the latter is the most straightforward consequence of getting your wish granted.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

Thanks dude, that means a lot coming from you. But yeah, I don't visit the motte when I'm sick, so you're only getting part of the picture. I can't go into it further without revealing more of my identity than I am comfortable with unfortunately.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

"Chopped" is apparently slang for "rough-looking."

I will say, this is a lot better than there being a (new) epidemic of men being chopped up or having their dicks chopped off. I suppose if you wanted to get particularly creative, a particularly disgusting case would be an epidemic of meat intended for eating being discovered as, well, "chopped man"!

Pokémon for Unrepentant Sociopaths: A Review of Reverend Insanity

Despite liking some Wuxia novels (some having over 2000 chapters, making them a little wordy and repetitive), I didn't like RI very much. I only read about 50 chapters, but it just felt lukewarm (does it get better?). The progression system was too simple (in the beginning we're told that there's 5 tiers of Gu, which is like buying a new RPG game to find out that the maximum character level is 10) My second reason will probably surprise some people - it's too tame. I didn't expect it to be described as brutal on the Motte (it's described as such on Reddit, but Reddit is filled with people who are afraid of disagreement, criticism, light discrimination, and displays of confidence).

Don't get me wrong, it's not bad, but what the characters in the story describe as boldness and arrogance just seems like regular self-respect to me. In a world where you can give people mental breakdowns by suggesting that men are stronger than women, yeah, the story can be considered based (and fictional characters which aren't pathetic is a nice break from modern slop), but this is still a relative judgement rather than an absolute one. Go back 10-20 years and I don't think there's anything special about RI. I've spent most of my life being called things like soft, sensitive, kind and innocent, but Fang Yang cannot even compare to myself in the personality traits that I see him praised for having.

Seeing romance as a weakness seems like the surface-assessment of a 14-year-old. You should rather let yourself fall in love with somebody far out of your league - this would help you improve faster. Motivation comes from emotions, so killing all your emotions doesn't make you a perfect rational agent, it merely drains your life of meaning and reasons to go on. I'm quite confident that crazy people generally outperform rational people unless the latter is highly conscientious - "you must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star". The "Dao" that these cultivators build is literally a worldview/a personal path. Manga like "The world after the fall" show this concept well. People who are too rational cannot do this, they barely have their own opinions and values, they believe that things are either universally true or universally false, they do not have faith in subjective and personal things.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

Is their heart going to be more in it when it's their own homeland they're burning and shelling?

Probably, yes. Civil wars do tend to have a lot of massacres because both sides consider the other to be traitors and not a legitimate state actor to whom the laws of war apply. Remember, "The Blue Tribe has performed some kind of very impressive act of alchemy, and transmuted all of its outgroup hatred to the Red Tribe." That's a lot of hatred, although perhaps still less than that which the Red Tribe has for the Blue.

On reflection - and you're right, I was kinda repeating old arguments without sufficient reflection - I was basically assuming "tyrant has first move, has the armed forces in lockstep, and is willing to wage Vernichtungskrieg", which is the worst-case scenario for the militia. I will note that you are, in fact, still talking about a lot more than small arms here; mortars are far, far more effective than small arms, and are not something the Blue Tribe is currently trying to take away from private citizens (I'm... pretty sure there's nowhere in the USA where random people can walk into a store and buy a mortar? Something something, Federal Firearms Licence? So then, a militia that has them is specifically either one with illegal stockpiles, one that's basically pulled a fast one on the tyrannous government regarding having such licences, or one with improvised mortars constructed after the start of hostilities when the term "legal" becomes meaningless). And even then, I don't think that's enough to win the war. The peace, yes, I'll vaguely allude to that being a fairly-likely win. But not the war, not if the armed forces are united against you for reasons.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

Agreed. Actually the first link about Oprah contains another 22 celebrities promoting childless lifestyle. This push definitely exists.

Pokémon for Unrepentant Sociopaths: A Review of Reverend Insanity

That largely captures my impression from the review - well, it was this plus "man, that prose is painful".

I just don't see much appeal in this kind of, for lack of a better way of putting it, rationalist fantasy. Symbol manipulation fantasy? Lawyer fantasy? The fantasy that the world or power or being can be reduced to an endless set of rules, which a clever individual (who is surely in no way a proxy for the author) can exploit to transcend over the sheepish masses.

It's not that it's juvenile, though it is that, but something worse. It's boring. Most of what I got from the review was that this is a story about a monster calculating his way to power. The review suggests that there are compelling characters, but names none of them, and that there are powerful themes, but names none of them, and I just don't know what I'm supposed to do with what's left. It mentions a few things that could be themes - the nature of mortality, whether ethics are context-dependent, and so on - but doesn't seem to go anywhere with them.

At a glance I see a lot of tropes of internet fiction. There's the isekai protagonist, the idea of 'looping' or New-Game-Plus-ing reality, power-scaling and tier lists, and a story that's basically about a smart nerd exploiting the game mechanics of reality, and this is all wrapped in the endless, self-indulgent length that is a common flaw of amateur authors who are a bit too in love with their own creation.

I'm glad that the OP enjoyed the story, but for me, that sounds like something I never want to read.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

Trad christians pro-natality is a byproduct of their anti-sex mindset: every sex act must carry the maximum penalty, and a child is the last punishment available when they run out of stones and insults. By contrast, nazis are pro-natality first , and a ‘sex positive’ mindset is a natural consequence.