domain:ashallowalcove.substack.com
MonkeyWithAMachinegun
Dancing to Tom Paine's Bones
38m ago
The irony inherent in that decision tickles me something fierce.
Utilitarianism holds that what is best for the largest group of people is correct (summarizing). What is best for the largest group of people is apparently, deontology. Thus utilitarianism can be explained as the belief that deontology is correct.
PokerPirate
38m ago
I've been thinking about the role of shaming children into desirable behavior recently. My wife is firmly against shaming in any form---she's a practicing psychologist and so is used to seeing the ways that shame has been used to emotionally torture people. But my experience is that judiciously applied shaming can greatly motivate people of all ages. Your story here is a good example.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
39m ago
My wife is really hoping for twins for the economies of scale. Quadruplets would be a bit much though, I don't think I can come up with 4 precisely equal names.
WhiningCoil
40m ago
This is true, but also still feels atypical. This goes back into childhood ignorance, but I remember precisely zero about George Bush Sr's VP except people clowning on him. Al Gore I remember precisely zero about during his term as VP. Dick Cheney was always more of a shadowy figure, presumed to be pulling the strings from the shadows, but rarely out in front doing anything visible to the public. The only thing I remember about Joe Biden as VP was when he got in trouble for saying "Shylock" and the ADL came out and said he was up to date on his protection money donations and that he was absolutely not an antisemite. Oh, and when Obama put him in charge of curing cancer during a State of the Union address. Pence did fuck and all during Trump's first term.
That Vance is out there, regularly, and seemingly successfully, advocating the President's agenda feels atypical across all my life experience. He gives on strong podcast "Debate me bro" energy that might just be an artifact of the times we live in.
crushedoranges
42m ago
I've been trying to nail down what I find so off-putting and alienating about the way you express your opinion.
It brings to mind the social structure of the Qing dynasty, who puts the working class - the peasantry, workers and artisans, and merchants - above entertainers, soldiers, low-level bureaucrats. For an orderly and stable society to function, the scholar-gentry of the Empire had to give a level of respect to the masses who fed and clothed everyone. That someone has to do the hard work so that you can spend all day doing intellectual and creative things is a basic fact that is the root of nobles oblige.
Every elite class that has ever existed recognizes the need to respect their lessers for doing this.
But you don't.
The fact that your contempt is so nakedly obvious, and that you're either foolish or conceited enough to not have the grace to keep it to yourself. You are not a wise man. You are not an intellectual sticking it to the hidebound hicks who don't recognize your genius.
You are Grima Wormtongue.
faceh
43m ago
I think that might be how it feels until she slips into a particular corner of tiktok or where-ever that starts shaping her mind in ways that you will truly dislike.
In such cases you might prefer being the main sort of her validation.
Unless she has a good mental filter of her own to keep nonsense from taking root.
PokerPirate
45m ago
There's a couple at my church who were having trouble conceiving. For them, the doctor did say "you just need to do X and then it'll all work out" where X was a hormonal injection into the woman. Apparently she wasn't ovulating and so this obviously resulted in no babies.
Well the hormones worked too well. She started releasing multiple eggs/month, and now they have a set of twins and quadruplets... 6 kids under 5 years old...
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
47m ago
I feel like we've heard more from Vance in the last six months than we heard from Harris for her entire term. Maybe some of that is at the President's discretion (giving speeches to NATO and such), but I think Harris could have been more visible if she wanted. Vance is posting that-which-Trump-is-probably-contractually-bound-not-to to X, and had that notable incident on Bluesky recently.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
47m ago
I saw maybe six white people in the entire store, and no white or even hispanic employees.
When I go to Costco, there is not necessarily a shortage of white people. However, there seems to be a total lack of white people under 40. I assume it's related to day/time when I go, but it's an ominous feeling.
ABigGuy4U
48m ago
You don’t like Bernie, that doesn’t mean that other people don’t. You probably didn’t think Trump had a snowball’s chance in hell at winning either. If Bernie was so unpopular, why did the Democratic Party have to undertake heroic action every single primary to thwart him? And even if Bernie couldn’t win, it would have been better to let him take his shot, lose bigly, and put the issue to bed for good instead of creating a permanent Lost Cause myth and losing the left wing of the party for good.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
55m ago
Because we don't study history, and we lose the cultural understanding that made those works great in the first place. We forget the lessons our fathers learnt in blood when we forget the art that touched their hearts. We doom ourselves to falling into the same pits they did.
Its annoying as hell to strike up a decent convo with a woman you find attractive, only to find out she doesn't do much aside from Netflix, Starbucks, Shopping at Target, and maybe Music Festivals or something
You must be frequently annoyed then.
The modal chick’s interests and hobbies consist of consooming, painting her face, taking selfies, and teeheeing around in skimpy outfits, but she will complain men are BORING with no sense of irony. Men have the burden of performance.
and is generally not in great financial shape to boot.
Reminds me of a Tweet from some chick that was making the rounds, along the lines of:
Boyfriend: “Would you date a broke, struggling guy?”
Me: “No, for personal reasons”
Boyfriend: “What if I told you that to me, you are that struggling guy?”
I can’t stop thinking about this convo
And naturally some Noticers laughed at her phrasing it as “personal reasons” rather than acknowledging hypergamy.
Someone who would be a nice supplement/complement to your own life and isn't going to disrupt your own routines.
One chick I casually dated at least had some self-awareness on that front.
No one:
Her: “If we got serious one day and moved in together, I don’t see how I would contribute to your lifestyle, you even know how to cook and clean better than I do”
Me: *Anakin face*
Her: “There is something I could contribute, right?”
Me: *Anakin face*
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1hr ago
Or, for that matter, whether a stronger VP might have pushed Biden to the curb years before. An ambitious, mildly evil VP, like a young LBJ or Bill Clinton, would have stuck a knife in Biden as soon as he looked weak.
If there's one criticism of Harris that's untrue, it would be that she's insufficiently ambitious. The VP just doesn't have a lot of formal power to do anything, and even leaks will get found out in a non-Trump administration if they're consistent. The VP is just utterly at the mercy of the head honcho, and this was doubly true in the uncertain times around Biden's dropout since plenty of people wanted to have a mini-primary.
yofuckreddit
1hr ago
This is exactly what I did. Eventually.
- Got a balance bike. But a cheap one with no handbrake, so it didn't really work on hills and was too small for a big kid.
- Got a training wheel bike. A grandparent got this without my real authorization, so it was ultra-heavy chinesium crap (heavier than my adult bikes) with awful geometry and impossible to pedal up hills. Led to a ton of frustration and balance anti-patterns.
- Splurged on a higher-end kids bike with handbrakes (In this case, I think you go with Priority or Woom. Guardian sucks). Used it as a balance bike. Added the pedals after a while. Voilia.
TequilaMockingbird
Brown-skinned Fascist MAGA boot-licker
1hr ago
Trump isn't a Clinton Democrat as much as he is a 90s era labour-oriented centerist. IE the sort of "old Democrat" that the Clintons and thier "New Democrat" coalition displaced.
Lizzardspawn
1hr ago
I think you are wrong here. Because no one bothers to teach kids to understand stuff. We pile things they don't understand on things they don't understand and we are surprised when the only way out of it is torturous inefficient memorization and impossibility of application.
Case in point - history. Take a look where the fertile land, water for irrigation and trade routes go and you will have a pretty good idea what will happen and why.
Physics - I started learning physics at fifth grate - I immediately figured out that most of physics laws are - take a spherical cow in vacuum, multiply everything that affects it add something for initial conditions and a constant to fit the real world data. Suddenly physics became a lot easier. The only thing that annoyed me was S = V0*t + aT^2/2 ... because I couldn't figure out why the fuck that 1/2 division is. And i got it at 10th grade when we learned what integral is.
Education system is like TSA - it is theater, not the real deal. We give engineering degrees for taking exams and writing papers, and not by throwing people on a deserted island with hand tools and getting back 1 month later to check if they have gotten to the early stages of the industrial revolution.
That is because no one explains what are monads the right way. The answer is simple - those are your side effects, but wrapped in complicated syntaxis because Haskell people need to feel superior. The same way our informatics teacher explained pointers - this is just address in memory but you can abuse them to do fun stuff. Applying something right is easy once you grok the nature of it.
Let's get pointers - if you know what is pointer you can design a class from first principles - it doesn't take huge jump to create a memory blob, put some header information - congratulations that is struct. but let's put another blob attached to it with pointers to executable code - now we have a class. But i want to modify already existing class - well just play with the blobs values a bit - you have inheritance.
But we educate usually in the opposite way - we give everything around the concept and hope for the light bulb moment that people see the concept instead of the other way around.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1hr ago
That jeopardy clue is going to hit so hard one day.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1hr ago
4 million deportations by the end of 2028
I have no interest in a bet of any size, just curious about the details. Do voluntary self-removals also count? I assume all removals have to be documented, not vague estimates like most immigration stats are?
I'm not impressed by K2 so far at all. I did a check with one of my usual questions, and it did horribly. It hallucinated that North Dakota borders Nebraska, and then claimed the vowels of North Dakota in order were o, h, a, and o. I'm also getting quite bad results on programming questions as well, things that the trio of frontier models (o3, Opus, and Gemini 2.5 pro) handle with relative ease. It's not even that cheap, only being on par with Gemini 2.5 flash in that regard.
I hear it's decent at creative writing, but that's sort of a wishy-washy benchmark. Maybe it will become the smut model of choice like R1 was for a while? That's... something at least?
aqouta
1hr ago
The Ratfucking of Bernie Sanders: The mainstream of the Democratic Party saw the momentum of the Bernie Sanders campaign, after he won the first three primaries in 2020. Biden wasn’t within 10% of Bernie in any of those primaries. Typically, after three straight fourth place finishes, a candidate drops out, that’s the purpose of primaries. Joe Biden, in fact, had some experience finishing poorly in early primaries and dropping out, having done it twice before. But the Dems needed someone to beat Bernie, and were stuck choosing in a bad field: Klobuchar, Buttigieg, and Warren were all seen as too weak to step up and couldn’t agree on endorsing each other. Facing a split field among moderates, with COVID appearing on the horizon, and with no other unity candidate available, the rest of the field suddenly dropped out and rapidly endorsed Biden. Biden was seen as a compromise candidate because he was so old, he might only run for one term. This was a classic example of the Golem legend: they empowered Biden to protect them from Bernie, but Biden once empowered did not have to give that power up when it was time. The lesson being that you have to let the primary process play out, and that voters will punish you if you refuse to let them vote. The Republicans threw in with Trump in 2016, against their better instincts but to their long term benefit; the Democrats ratfucked Bernie in 2020 and the lack of a real primary left them with a reanimated corpse that finished 4th in competitive races. Tapper mentions Bernie only twice, for a moment, and pays no attention to how he played into the 2020 primary and the selection of Biden. The Original Sin was gutting the primary process and not forcing Biden to compete among voters.
Will this obviously wrong and tired narrative ever go away? Bernie doesn't win because people don't want a leftist candidate, even in the primary let alone the general, he would get slaughtered. His path to victory has always required all the more moderate candidates to split the more popular policy platform in so many ways that he could sneak through with a plurality but not majority. Deciding not to let the less popular candidate win by avoiding creating the specific conditions that they need to win without getting the popular vote is not "ratfucking".
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1hr ago
excepting of course that he may have been saying it with his trademark irony…
It is indeed somewhere in Innocents Abroad, so it was likely intended ironic but modern readers take it as literal.
WhiningCoil
1hr ago
Yeah, so this art book is what I let my daughter browse through while I read the novel to her. But another friend of mine read this illustrated version to her son. Probably advantages to both. Giving my daughter a separate book I think worked for us because she had some control over what she was looking at while I read.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1hr ago
Joe Biden is the only one to beat Donald Trump in an election
Trump nominally ran in the primary for the Reform Party in 2000 and lost to Pat Buchanan.
I tentatively agree, but in the sense that "people need to reach a breaking point before they will return to the thing that they've been avoiding all along."
The church has the advantage of having been around for centuries and centuries, so they will be the default option people return to when most else fails.
But in the meantime I think the phones will probably win the attention game.
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