domain:ashallowalcove.substack.com
I've realized that the 'cheat code' is buying a motorcycle and getting ostentatious tattoos and at least one (1) subversive piercing.
In recent years, I've wondered if this will soon come full circle and being tattoo-less and piercing-less (especially the former) will become the rebellious and subversive thing to do, given their overall saturation and their increasing association with numale-adjacent caricatures. In the MMA realm, for example, I've seen Costa*, Dricus, the Russian Muslim fighters, etc. get confused praise (in the unironically "wtf I love [x]?"-type sentiment) for being tattooless in a sport where tattoos are commonplace, like a "fuck you" to mainstream Western trends and a greater signal of confidence to not hide behind ink. Although if you're a famous MMA fighter, your stats (tattoos or not) are already high.
* Costa actually has at least one tattoo, but it's hard to see so people think of him as tattooless. He's tattooless-passing, I suppose.
And three years into the marriage, for no reason that I can even decipher, she just up and leaves him, he tries counseling, gives it every single try for reconciliation, and no dice. THANKFULLY it ended up being an 'uncontested' divorce with no kids (despite him being VERY CLEAR up front that he wanted kids, remember that family business he's got).
The mainstream rejoinder would be that your buddy must had been No True Trustworthy Husband or his wife would never have left him—that he must had become lazy or neglectful after marriage-trapping her, was financially or emotionally abusive behind the scenes, or thought of her as a broodmare for the family business. He's not entitled to her as his wife and she's free to change her mind about children and the marriage after the wedding; YTA for having such a potentially abusive man-child with his nerdy hobbies and faMiLy bUsInEsS as your "buddy."
TheFooder
3hr ago
I was surprised by this as well. All he had to say was, "I'm not familiar with Cooper's work." Heaven forbid Douglas Murray not have an opinion on something. My weak-man take is Murray made an ass out of himself, but I only watched snippets and reactions. Rogan is too long and meandering for my tastes.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
3hr ago
I hope they aren't building 0.51 miles of new lines every year.
Yup.
I happen to think being trustworthy will in fact help you find a good woman.
But it won't hope you attract women in general.
Which is a necessary step in most cases.
I've realized that the 'cheat code' is buying a motorcycle and getting ostentatious tattoos and at least one (1) subversive piercing. Nips, large gauges in the ears, Prince Albert, I think even nose piercings 'work' for guys these days. Its an old, OLD trick but it still works if you're willing to at least LARP the part.
This signals enough riskiness to get the initial interest going.
Meanwhile, if you're good looking AND you work as hard as you can to be perceived as 'safe' and 'reliable' you're effectively squandering that natural advantage, and you're more likely going to be defected against when she realizes there are no consequences for doing so, you won't even raise your voice to yell at her.
I watched it happen to a buddy of mine. He was the literal pinnacle of 'ideal' hubby. Successful (heir to a large regional chain of interior decor stores, pulling down six figs), charming and witty, even though he's not an Adonis, popular among his friends, takes the wife on trips, indulges her whims, but also makes sure he has time for his own (nerdy) hobbies. Not a pushover, but would never dream of striking or upsetting her. Marries a very mid but definitely cute wife. They have an expensive fairy-tale wedding, honeymoon, etc. etc.
And three years into the marriage, for no reason that I can even decipher, she just up and leaves him, he tries counseling, gives it every single try for reconciliation, and no dice. THANKFULLY it ended up being an 'uncontested' divorce with no kids (despite him being VERY CLEAR up front that he wanted kids, remember that family business he's got).
In an 'ideal' world this should never happen, he played everything 'by the rules.' And still lost.
A good woman, of course, won't do this, but if you're a safe, 'boring' type of guy then you won't have your choice of woman to even try and zero in on the 'good' ones.
If you choose a couple stats to max out, trustworthy probably shouldn't be one of them.
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
3hr ago
a leftist argument
These people are native to Europe. Not the Americas or Africa. Sounds like you need to Google what the word native means.
In what world is that a leftist argument? Is it even an argument at all?
https://x.com/MattWalshBlog/status/1923128567996780750
I've been in the middle of some bullshit outrage cycles in my day, but the one that some of you cooked up this week is probably the fakest of all. There are even "conservatives" hounding me and demanding that I apologize for a hidden swastika that someone else posted in a tweet that I replied to.
Just to be perfectly clear to all of the slimy little smear merchants playing this game: I apologize for nothing. I owe you nothing. I will not explain myself to you. You all know exactly what you're doing. If anyone is owed an apology in this situation, it's me. But I don't expect one because that would require a level of honor and honesty that none of these trolls possess. Piss off. All of you. There's my statement, for the many who have asked.
It's pretty clever, on my computer I wouldn't have seen it if someone hadn't said something. I could tell it was AI though. When the image is small it's clear as day. He didn't tweet it, he didn't even retweet it, he replied disagreeing with the person who posted the picture and statement.
TIRM
3hr ago
They are working at a rate of 0.5 to 0.7 miles per year. Given how many miles of line they have it would take around a century for the high priority phase 1 lines and around another three centuries for lower priority lines. A city engineer did the math and drew a timeline given how fast they work.
They do this really really slowly and at a projected cost of billions of dollars.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
4hr ago
Edit: Just a few days ago, Matt Walsh reposted a crypto-Swastika on X (if you don't see it at first, try squinting). I believe he knew what he was doing.
I doubt it. It's not at all easy to notice unless someone tells you it's there, and the guy Wash is replying to (the one who posted the picture, I assume) is making a leftist argument, which Matt is rebutting. There's no tongue in cheek winking or anything like that.
Sloot
4hr ago
Being 'trustworthy' just makes you an easier mark.
Ha yeah. A good instance of "Should you reverse any advice you hear?"
The struggling young man who finds it plausible that he needs to be more trustworthy to attract women instead needs to dial his perceived trustworthiness down and "toxic masculinity" way up—and to see as examples, "am I fighting for a spot no one wants??!!" or "somewhat cute, non-threatening appearance" from the "guy who likes you but you're not quite attracted to him starterpack."
The modal trustworthy husband and father of two gets deadbedroom'd and is invisible to other women when he's not wearing his wedding ring; a husband and father of two who murders his wife and daughters gets love letters in prison:
"In my heart, you are a great guy," wrote a woman named Candace.
"I'm hoping to brighten your days," wrote another woman. Someone even sent a picture of herself in a bikini.
Must be bro's elite trustworthiness.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
4hr ago
The article explains: 200 miles of line to be buried ÷ 0.5 mile of line buried (costing 5.5 megadollars) per year = 400 years.
Some have suggested doubling the tax to halve the life of the project, but city officials say the disruption to traffic and available crews would make that impossible.
faceh
4hr ago
I would add the caveat that women hold most of the power over the majority of men WHILE a particular class of man is still able to ultimately get what he wants and ignore the consequences at will. So women can still CLAIM that men are privileged and running things b/c at the very top levels, this is still true.
And this is the lesson I 'fear' young men are learning. If you're an average man, your life is going to be subjugated to female whims from birth until almost death. If you piss off, harm, or otherwise insult a woman you will be pilloried and probably locked out of the reproductive success game entirely.
UNLESS you're in the top 20% of males by status. Wait now its 10%. Now its 1%. Now its .1%. Those guys can flout social rules, laws, and ignore female complaints to just take the thing they want at will. Its good to be the king.
Guys who grow up being viscerally aware of the game and their place in it are either going to compete AGGRESSIVELY to take one of those top slots, and thereby keep raising the level of competition to even higher levels, or will drop out entirely rather than support the 'rigged contest.
TheFooder
4hr ago
400 is such an outrageous timeline why would they bother? Was it a joke? Was there one or two certain tasks that sucked up most of the timeline?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4hr ago
If you have a problem with white nationalists and cryptonazis, you can say so: that's a popular opinion in normieland. You don't need to invent fake terms that only you and a particular clique define.
Normies are pretty burned out on accusations of nazi and racist and so forth. Also, the target pretty clearly isn't the normie masses, it's an inter-activist fight within what was until now a big-tent coalition on the right.
helmut_hofmeister
4hr ago
Not sure how well known this is - but if I ever get to Sydney I want to check out the HMAS Sydney / SMS Emden memorial. I think it’s just an old (but intact) WWI war trophy in Hyde Park somewhere, but it’s great tale, especially for military history aficionados.
crushedoranges
4hr ago
Woke right is not a thing: it never was a thing, because actual Nazis, fascists, and white nationalists don't use or accept critical theory. Any resemblance (da joos vs da whitey) is coincidental: the true similarity is that both wokism and fascism are illiberal, but for completely different reasons.
Let us use argumentum ad Hitlerum to demonstrate what I mean. Hitler is uncontroversially a Nazi, a fascist, and a white nationalist. To call him 'woke' is a definitional collapse. He's not building a intersectional coalition against Zionism and its supporters. He has a particular volkgeist and conceptions of ethnic superiority that is not postmodern in the least. (This is why hoteps aren't woke, despite arguably being the originator of the term: they're particular, not universal.)
It's dumb. It's dumb, lazy thinking: liberals playing definitional games and labels as if they mean anything. If you have a problem with white nationalists and cryptonazis, you can say so: that's a popular opinion in normieland. You don't need to invent fake terms that only you and a particular clique define.
ABigGuy4U
4hr ago
Sure the Chinese are not immune to “fuck you, I got mine” but at least in the past they were generally pretty capable of buckling down and sacrificing personal desires for the good of the family or the nation. Whether they still are remains to be seen, that hasn’t been tested on a large scale in quite a while.
TIRM
4hr ago
There is some discussion of cost disease around here. Scott wrote a bit about it. May I present its cousin: schedule disease.
There is a particularly silly recent example. The city of Pasadena in California has a project to bury some power lines. That's the sort of thing you expect a local government to do. There are various benefits to buried power lines. All good so far. Not obviously silly or indicative of a broad societal failure.
Guess what the estimated schedule will be? This is a town of 133k people. 23 square miles. The scope of this project is small. Take your best guess and check the spoiler below.
We used to be able to build things. Infrastructure. Nuclear power plants. Trains. The California high speed train project is a much more impactful example of cost and schedule disease. But this Pasadena buried power line project stands out for the combination of small scope and deranged schedule.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
4hr ago
Your complaints about GWOT are motivated reasoning, GWOT was quite successful for Israel at least.
Why is it motivated reasoning? My impression is that the GWOT is fairly widely regarded as...not the most successful foreign policy, no? Or are you trying to make the argument that the US state department is competent, but got played by even bigger-brained Israelis?
The US has been able to grow its economy extremely rapidly through Chinese industrialization, without that your, as marxists say, Internal Contradictions would have likely brought about a protracted recession already.
The confidence you have in stating these counterfactual alternate histories is just astounding to me, but I guess there's no stakes when nothing is falsifiable. I won't pretend to know what the world would look like had China failed to industrialize, but I'm also not buying your interpretation offered with the barest of rationales and no evidence. I could just as easily argue that a world where China failed to industrialize is one in which glorious America land still stands head and shoulders above the rest of the world with no real peers, and the only way to settle the argument would be the floridity of our prose and our imaginations.
Don't forget that in 2008, it was China that bailed you out.
Ah, that was very generous of them. I'm sure self-interest played no part in it, and it's not even clear what you mean by that - buying treasuries? If so, they bought treasuries throughout the early 2000s at a rate not that different from 2008 - was that also for altruistic reasons?
1970s-2023, I'd say. Your safe and prosperous world is a product of an overall competent policy. Just continuing and improving on Biden's program could have been enough. See the success of CHIPS act, for example.
Vietnam war and Afghanistan/Iraq were competent policy? What about the inflation of the 70s and early 80s? All the NIMBYist policies that birthed our housing crisis and inability to build anything, falling birth rate, crumbling infrastructure? Contrary to some of the blackpillers, I won't pretend that the last 50 years have unilaterally been failures, but all the available evidence points towards relatively normal people muddling along rather than a cabal of puppetmasters making the rest of the world dance. All the problems that put us on the path to being peers of and/or eclipsed by China were born during the golden age you're gesturing towards.
Like owning the biggest consumer market in the world
How do you propose to leverage this? Tariffs?
most of the world's most prized IP
Indeed - Thankfully, China also has a robust track record of respecting those IP rights.
having military presence in all corners of the world.
Maybe.
I'd say you left out immense natural resources (even more so if you include the 51st state), vast oceans on both flanks and (I laugh while writing this) the ability to appeal to talented immigrants from around the world, and integrate them into the social fabric.
I recall I did predict a long grinding war after like a week of it.
I'll take your word for it. Would you agree that the vast majority of people have gotten it wrong, over and over again? Including (I'd guess we can infer) the US and Russian state departments?
What did you say at the time?
I kept my mouth shut because I at least have the self-awareness to know that I know fuck all about Ukraine and Russia.
Sorry, this sounds very much like Russian “we haven't even started yet” narrative to me.
Hardly. It's an argument that we were undeniably the most powerful country in the world and, while we caused plenty of misery, our reign was fairly benign.
I'm under no illusions that America in 2025 is the superpower it was in 2000, or that China is a nation of rapacious peasants riding the coattails of the Master Race to success. There's a fair chance that China destroys my industry the same way they destroyed western manufacturing, with your prized Tsinghua graduates grinding 996 for poverty wages to fuck me in the ass.
But you have a susceptibility to grand, romantic narratives where small numbers of people can leverage their brilliance into enormous influence on the course of history rather than human matters largely being emergent phenomena. If you think I'm wrong, make some concrete predictions about how China will bring about America's ruin in the next three years - should be plenty of time for a couple of Tsinghua galaxy-brains forged in the fires of the gaokao to run circles around some retarded Orange Man sycophants, no?
ABigGuy4U
4hr ago
The problem is that anything that has a mandatory hearing before the Supreme Court is going to put a massive strain on their case load. Voting Rights Act cases already have this and it’s a huge pain.
hydroacetylene
4hr ago
This won’t happen. America is HUGE. Not being able to afford a home in top metros won’t stop most Americans from home ownership because lots of Americans will move to Indianapolis for a more affordable lifestyle- far more than 15% of them.
Yes, there are bubbles- and some of those bubbles are disproportionately influential- which view living in a second tier city(or having black neighbors) as a fate worse than death. But most Americans aren’t part of them. Standard of living trumps all, it’ll shake itself out. This isn’t an Asian country where conformism lets such tendencies run rampant.
Tree
4hr ago
That’s a good defining aspect of the woke right.
The discrimination against whites and males, that is on the books, enshrined in government contracts, jurisprudence, harvard. Explicit. Not woke right.
To justify the octopus conspiracies otoh, they have pamphlets from the 19th century, hinting at early life bios of successful people, coded parentheses, jewish media interpretation, and aryan studies. It's all implicit mystery knowledge, like the tenets of scientology. You then become clear, awaken, put on the 'they live' glasses, get a superpower where you don't have to check early life section anymore.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
4hr ago
they're saying they use the same illiberal tactics as the woke
Do the illiberal tactics include trying to scare away Joe Rogan and other people with big platforms from having conversations with certain people? Do they include lumping in people you don't like with nazis? Do they include complaints about online abuse when people start commenting on how you're being ridiculous?
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
5hr ago
Can you name people who actually have this as their ideology except random anon accounts on Twitter?
I sense that people like Lomez are probably the closest to what you mean, but he's published enough books that contradict this reading profusely that it seems specious.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
5hr ago
Not at all, what they are referring to is people on the right wing who do not buy into liberalism.
Otherwise you're going to have to explain to me when Auron McIntyre has ever done any of these things for Lindsey to coin the term to go after him and his ilk.
I think that does make a lot of sense. But my main concern is to limit the ability to issue a national injunction to “break-glass” levels of emergency. The idea being that the principle in question is so important to the public good, Justice, or good government that allowing it to continue before SCOTUS takes it on would result in grave harm. I don’t want it completely ended, but at the same time I don’t want it to be used casually as a “we don’t like this” measure.
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