domain:epistle.us
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2hr ago
If you meet a famous / powerful person (even if they are context-dependent famous) and they are kind of dumb-bubbly in personality (think "human golden retriever) they are probably incredibly smart in either IQ or EQ.
If you meet a famous / powerful person (even if they are context-dependent famous) and they are tight-lipped, only say the minimum, and seem sort of distant they are probably incredibly smart in either IQ or EQ but feel an tremendous amount of imposter syndrome
If you meet a famous / powerful person (even if they are context-dependent famous) and they talk like their context's version of Elon Musk or a podcast bro - they're a charlatan who has mostly gotten to where they are on political maneuvering and deception ..... or you are literally talking to elon musk.
Esseintes
Que sçay-je?
2hr ago
Within Japan, expatriate women from North America (US and Canada) or Europe are either: 1) Divorced 2) married to or the consort of a Japanese man. 1) Will be politically progressive 2) will be neutral, disinterested, or conservative
In my experience, the vast majority of North American expatriate men in Japan are also progressive, especially the ALT crowd. Which is hardly surprising since they are almost uniformly liberal arts college grads fresh out of school.
ok-target-7361
2hr ago
You misunderstand me if you think I'm interested in rules lawyering. What I'm curious about is how committed you all are to the rules-based order. So far, between me and the Jew-posters, you seem to be committed to banishing assholes more than having legible principles.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2hr ago
Is it performative?
My theory is yes, it is performative.
It's a way of ostentatiously showing in-group solidarity by demonstrating you know what things ought to be lauded. This will get you a lot of praise from the in-group. Add on some very stylistic expression of praise for "the correct thing to like" (i.e. the whole "crab legs" thing) and now you get a bonus for creative expression of solidarity.
ok-target-7361
2hr ago
In the defense of midwits, people who argue against the hypothetical intuitively sense that the other party is trying to convince them of something, and that is always unambiguously suspect, so it's better not to give the other party an inch.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2hr ago
I like this comment because of the avalanche of "multiple things can be true at once" it evidences;
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Romeo was an otherwise good kid who didn't know how to handle his emotions in one specific context and - were this an office instead of a rock climbing gym - was certainly risking being fired with, perhaps, a lot of downstream career damage.
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@FiveHourMarathon demonstrated excellent leadership and tact in the storeroom-lights-out rouse ... but may have technically run a foul of HR policy in my imagined office-centric parallel universe
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Men being "human doings" is absolutely how many males self-conceive yet revealing that to women frequently elicits some sort of variation on "oh, get over it! Learn to love yourself." (Side note: this is where a lot of modern psychology utterly fails to help men. Build That Shed)
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Male performance related failure absolutely should be met with a constructive "hey, I lost, but I can get better / I can take pride in my level of effort etc." yet will also have a some amount of "HOLY SHIT I AM A FUCKING WASTE OF SPACE" as part of that process.
his main supporter base is "leftist" leaning people who care about the covid hysteria, covid injections, pharma system corruption, medical system corruption, food industrial complex corruption, military industrial complex corruption, and some other anti-establishment positions
originally, a large component of his supporter base were also anti-war but his support for Israeli war on Gazans caused heavy attrition among those people
I've no reason to distrust.
I recognize that name and she had a horrendous record of being wrong on pretty much every COVID topic and her opinion on giving the covid injection to children and pregnant women should remove her from being taken seriously
for e.g., her apologetics w/re the laughable garbage masquerading as "data analysis" during the covid hysteria
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2hr ago
Treating stuff with extra decorum is kind of our thing.
No, I'm going to stick to my guns and I absolutely refuse to use a dark road analogy. It's legitimately one of the worst possible hypotheticals/thought experiments for this discussion.
- relatively rare situation few of us experience in daily life
- a far better situation would be an actual common and relatable one
- the people involved are very specific which makes the scenario feel overtly contrived
- very small changes in initial conditions can greatly affect individual responses which makes the scenario hard to discuss evenly
- if you cross the road to avoid someone in an obvious way, feelings are only mildly hurt, so even "discrimination" in this case is kinda like, ok whatever no big deal
- on the other hand you have presumably a major bodily harm risk
- which is again, rare when considering the totality of all possible race-related experiences
- can you see how this situation is not representative of a typical "do I discriminate" scenario? And easy to go in circles?
If you can't come up with a better example, it's probably because you don't have one (sorry).
Like, my actual real-world example of being a flooring salesman is much more typical. Some might defend giving disproportionate attention to perceived-as-rich people as a salesman because you do in fact have limited time, and you can get commission from higher sales, etc. I might even be wrong about being fair leading to more albeit less visible success/opportunities and maybe wasting time with poor people would hurt my sales. In either case, I'd defend the the moral requirement to treat people with a fair shake, and also defend the societal imperative to do and encourage the same.
Edit: Think I wasn't succinct enough in point #5. Made this description upthread which elaborates more:
Specifically, the "potential cost" I was referring to was actually "how does the group young blacks feel if someone crosses the road to avoid them". I don't think they would be that broken up about it, and I don't think it would make them feel particularly victimized (and even if they did the material impact on their life is approximately zero). So in that sense, it's a stupid example because both the overall societal cost and the impact on the discrimination recipient are low and also the potential cost to the discriminator is very high. This is, by all accounts, an abnormal rendering of a typical discrimination moral dilemma.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2hr ago
If we reserve the "good life" for "high value" people, things are going to get real bleak, real quick. But without the social support structures encouraging men and women to accept a good match, rather than always "marrying up," that's where we're headed.
This is exactly it. It doesn't matter if you're talking about marriage and family, career, or just general life circumstances, when you (I.e. mainstream culture) keeps pushing "shoot for the moon" the result is a detonation on the launch pad. This is meme-stocks, Botox, Eat, Pray, Love (both the book and the insufferable wall art), self-taught "AI experts", SoundCloud rappers, 38 year old club DJs, and dudes with their Instagram handle on their car.
Being average is OK needs to be the message for literally half (or more) of society. Know who you are, know that happiness comes from self-knowledge and adherence to whatever your chosen moral / virtue code is, not unbridled personal achievement (however noble that achievement may be). The America of Bruce Springsteen and "Jack and Diane" may have never actually existed, but it's still worth playing the songs.
CanofWorms
2hr ago
Been reading short stories by Kafka. I reread The Metamorphosis for the first time since high school and was struck by how sad it was. I like Kafka; his stories are so bizarre and his characters thought processes so strange, it is like stepping inside the brain of an alien life form.
DradisPing
2hr ago
I'm guessing that Eric Kripke has been struggling with the direction of writing this season. Basically the writing room needs a strong leader to steer things, and that's not happening.
So the only ideas that are getting into scripts are shallow attacks on the out group. Because if you speak out against the critical supe theory joke, you're a potential Trump sympathizer.
I think the rest of the season is probably going to suck. It's possible that they'll get it together but I think they are just going to get burnt out from the arguing and things will end on a bad note.
It is possible that they focussed on the later episodes, fleshed them out in detail, then realized they didn't have enough storyline material for the early episodes.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2hr ago
I know this because unlike these people I touch grass regularly
You can do better than this strawman.
The number of normie women who want marriage and kids with normie men is almost certainly greater than the number of number of normie men looking for the same thing.
What if the normie women's definition of "normie" men isn't real? Like, what if there is a documented, quantitative disparity here between basic gender perspectives of the other.
I think the modal normie guy is just fine with a wife who had a few boyfriends before him, who puts on some pounds after they start dating (and definitely after marriage and kids) and who sips wine wearing her "The Future is Female" tee-shirt while they watch the Notebook again.
I think that same "normie" woman in that scenario is (not so) secretly resentful that her now husband plays Toby Keith sometimes when he BBQs, doesn't keep up with This American Life, put on a few too many pounds after they got married and lost his nice butt he developed playing Div-3 lacrosse, and wonders about "that chick Ashley" that his frat bros bring up after a few beers when they visit.
Expectations and the delta between them and reality matter. Your "4/10" comment is totally valid, but it also works both ways.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3hr ago
Sure but being Jewish is a ethnically rooted property, not an ideological property like Nazism. You could be French and hate the French nation, seek its destruction and yet still be French. It would be impossible to be a French nationalist, however.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3hr ago
Unkind, unnecessarily antagonistic, not writing like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion, egregiously obnoxious, and multiple user reports.
I banned you for breaking the rules, so yeah, the decision to ban you came after identifying the rules you were breaking. But the case was, as you can see, wildly overdetermined. Coming back to open a rules lawyering session (as your aim appears to be here) is not going to benefit this account's longevity, though.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
3hr ago
but I really hope you and others reading this don’t sacrifice your happiness on the alter of weird twitter dating discourse.
Please don't minimize like this. I didn't report the comment because I believe in addressing things like this head on instead of running to the Mods.
This isn't "weird Twitter dating discourse" this is, as the kids say, "lived experience."
I spent part of my 20s trying to find Mrs. Tollbooth in order to settle down. I kept an "open mind" the way mainstream culture told me to and didn't care about past promiscuity, political incompatibility, their status as a child of divorce and/or poor relationship with father.
Each one of these relationships failed catastrophically for what I recognize now as very significant character and personality failures. I'll admit that I probably didn't do enough to highlight and try to correct bad behavior (again, I was trying to be accepting) and, in at least one case, sort of gave up but kept having sex because sex is fun (I view this now as personal weakness. I wonder what your average sex positive person would say).
So correlation is not causation, right? That these women had "questionable" backgrounds doesn't mean that those background caused these bad situations, right? Bullshit. The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. These women had failed to demonstrate a high-trust and durable relationship with any man in their life up to that point (one was even openly, frequently, and hostile-y critical of her very mild mannered and milquetoast brother). Why in the hell would I take all of the available data and throw it out because "don't believe what you read on Twitter"
I should've been fishing in other streams. I realize that now and that's what I do now. I've also cleaned my own act up over the course of several years. My fear is that what @2rafa said in another comment somewhere in this thread is true - I missed the boat on good pair-bonding in my 20s and now will have to "settle" for a woman who did the same in her 20s, but likely has the same view as I do now. Is that really settling and will I quietly resent her for life? Probably not, that's stupid. The fear remains.
But @faceh isn't being some sort of Twitter edgelord when he crunches them numbers and comes up with "welp, blackpill might be on the menu." He's reflecting the reality of thousands of younger unmarried men. And that reality is now manifesting in meaningful ways
PoseidonsLeftNipple
3hr ago
Buried in last week's thread, an exchange where it was argued that the Nazi's were not actually anti-slav:
Aryan descent (German blooded) is thus a person who is free of foreign blood, as seen by the German people. The blood of Jews and Gypsies also living in Europe, that of the Asian and African races and the Aborigines of Australia and America (Indians), are considered as foreign. For example, if a Englishman or a Swede, a Frenchman or a Czech, a Pole or an Italian, is free of such foreign blood, he must be regarded as Aryan, whether he lives in his native country or in East Asia or in America or he may be a US citizen or a South American Free State.
I've never seen this argument before. Is there any merit?
ace
3hr ago
If you have a bachelor’s in computer science degree outside the US and a master’s (but no more) from an American university then you will be the worst programmer I talk to this week.
Hyperion
4hr ago
One thing I like about fantasy and science fiction and so forth is its utility as a lens upon our own world: it lets us consider what things would be like if something we believe is true were different.
A lot of people are unable to consume media in this way. If a piece of media says something is true in this fictional hypothetical that wildly diverges from out world, they are trying to say it is also true in our world. So, Starship Troopers a story about a united humanity fighting against literal bugs is really promoting racism and white supremacy in our world, despite it's protagonist being Filipino.
It's similar to people who argue against the hypothetical in thought experiments. They seem to believe worlds in which their current politics fail just can't exist and anyone who would think up such a world only does so to push evil beliefs in the here and now.
TequilaMockingbird
4hr ago
In my experience "Bayesian Inferences" are just "biases and preconceptions" that the speaker wants to distinguish from those of thier interlocutor.
IE, you are biased, where as i am just being rational.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
4hr ago
I don’t know how else you’d handle magic creatures or aliens. They’re not the same species. Orcs are specifically not humans, and neither are elves. Klingons aren’t humans. And as such saying that an Orc or a Klingon doesn’t act like a Southern California PMC half wit isn’t quite the same as being a racist.
The things that make me uncomfortable in those settings is less that Orcs act differently than humans, it’s that all orcs have the exact same culture and belief system and nobody rejects it or questions it. Humans are certainly one species, but we are different and have different opinions and cultures and religions. Or maybe I just wonder what a hippy orc would be like.
ok-target-7361
4hr ago
Coffee smells lovely all the time. It's its taste that is comparable to the worst kinds of medicine. Which is weird, because the cooking nerds convinced me that most of the food flavor comes from the smell.
ABigGuy4U
4hr ago
I’ve noticed this effect with coffee. I love the smell of coffee in the morning, but I hate it in the evening. It could be because I associate the smell of coffee in the evening with some hellish all nighters I’ve pulled.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
4hr ago
That's a very apt way of putting into words my own suspicions, but I keep thinking there must be more out there, something I've missed or have misapprehended.
With this thread, I don't think I'm going to bother with this season. The only thing amusing to come out of this is Starlight's boggening https://i.4cdn.org/tv/1718365064375134.jpg (Actually pretty fucking sad to see)
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