domain:felipec.substack.com
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
3hr ago
I have a 1920s era German Luger. I would say it's in "fair" condition. The last two times I took it to the range, it misfired or hangfired. Is it possible to find someone who can fix it without (1) charging insane prices or (2) damaging/heavily modifying it? Or should I just mount it as a display piece?
"Generational warfare" was perhaps hyperbolic. I mean that the government is propping up assets that, absent their meddling, should come down in value, if things were at all sane like in the US.
It doesn't help the younger generation of Canadians now if their parents will eventually croak in 25 or 30 years and leave them the house (along with god knows what owed in deferred property tax. Have fun with that, kids! Edit: actually, maybe this is only a BC thing), nor does it help those who can't bank on an inheritance.
somedude
4hr ago
I think your belief that somehow placing your presumably-white kid in with your thinly-veiled majority Black school has a significant chance of landing them in the hospital or something is unsupported and warped by media perceptions and fearmongering.
The kid may or may not get literally stomped out, but the more black the school is, the worse it will be on pretty much every axis. Just like cities, just like countries, just like continents, and for generations now the high-minded folk telling me we can somehow rectify this have done nothing but fail miserably at every single turn.
Imagine actually staking your child's wellbeing on the idea that pie-in-the-sky intervention #8742 will be the one that finally works, much less believing that the attempt will somehow be good for them. Unthinkable. Laughable.
hanikrummihundursvin
4hr ago
Well I'm glad that you acknowledge that your entire argument is predicated on the belief that child-on-child, permanent-consequence outright violence is inevitable (or at least highly likely) to occur in deliberate group-mixing.
Where was this "acknowledgement" made? Also, where does this language come from? "Acknowledge"? Am I hiding something or doing things in a way you are not?
I take strong exception to that. I think your belief that somehow placing your presumably-white kid in with your thinly-veiled majority Black school has a significant chance of landing them in the hospital or something is unsupported and warped by media perceptions and fearmongering.
Not a "significant" chance. A greater chance. You clearly do not understand the argument. You can stop being glad.
Sure, we can go and agree that many Black communities have a violence problem.
Then there is no need to pretend there is a "fearmongering" part at play. Parents choosing to go to a safer school are doing what is best for their children if they value safety highly. We both agree which schools and which communities are safer.
I am aware and acknowledge your concern about how using kids to break a negative, self-reinforcing cycle feels a bit bad. But seriously, what else can we do?
If your only move is using other people's children, you need a new something.
Kids are sponges and need deliberate exposure to other ways of being and living while young.
Homogenous schools do just fine with their students and they, generally, have much better outcomes.
So I'd challenge this whole paradigm that parents are being somehow brainwashed by SJW-stuff into putting their kids in danger for no real return. Rather, I would like parents to acknowledge the time-lag danger of accidentally raising an intolerant, ignorant, or sheltered child.
This is an extremely racist statement that has no basis in reality. White children that come from homogenous environments are some of the happiest, healthiest and smartest in the world. There is nothing bad, comparatively, about them or their education to be found. If there was any benefit to be had from studying with lower income blacks, then those lower income blacks would surely have found it. Instead the first thing they find is delinquency, illiteracy and worse.
Again, in case I lost some focus: the whole point of my post is to point out that otherwise-benign and rational actions like the self-sorting only when in strongly minority situations can have severe, negative consequences for society at large. Think of it like a game theory problem. All we need is to tweak the rules slightly and we can fix the game! In this case, acknowledging that there are negative consequences of growing up in excessive homogeneity.
That is based on the assumption that white children can somehow fix black kids through their white supremacy via proximity. Considering that this is obviously not true, you have nothing outside of fancy game theory that looks great in an interactive blog post to defend your, frankly, vile and racist ideologically driven social intervention that would see children suffer in the name of ending racism or whatever.
TIRM
4hr ago
Not monkeys exactly but 10s of billions of neurons. Each one very much not intelligent or full of qualia.
When you or I generate a verbal statement sodium and potassium flow through billions of neurons and the best generated statement gets passed to our conscious awareness to say. It's a little "monkeys on typewriters"-ish.
Imagine [primitive and modern people sincerely trying to kill each other]. Does the technology differential between these two scenarios change the fundamental nature of what they're doing?
"Fundamental" is a slippery word but I'm going to go with "no". However, if we switch from "primitive/modern people trying to kill each other" to "one primitive/modern nation-states trying to conquer another and take their stuff", I think that the modern world in which nuclear weapons and reliable second-strike capabilities exist is fundamentally different than the primitive one in which those things don't exist. In the ancient world, the conquered could salt their own fields to prevent the conquerer from benefiting from their conquest, but it is only in the modern world that "I refuse to be conquered, instead we will all die in a fire together" is an option.
Similarly, how has technology changed the fundamental nature of being rich or poor, of love or hate, of joy or sorrow, ecstasy or despair, contentment, yearning, frustration, misery, or any of the other highs or lows of the human condition?
Lows aren't as low or as frequent, highs are mostly as high as before. I don't know if the "fundamental nature" has changed but the changes are large and important and I think to a certain extent arguing about whether things are "fundamental" comes down to word games.
My wife and I went through something similar to the situation you've described, and I likewise am pretty sure that without medical technology neither she nor our firstborn would be alive. On the other hand, I am quite sure that they and I will die, and I do not know when. What has actually changed?
In the end we all die. But our children will live first. If you don't value that I'm not sure what to say.
But hasn't this always been true? "Abundance", and for that matter "poverty", seem to me to be entirely relative. [...] When I read about the King of Carthage surrendering to the Romans, and his Queen cursing him and choosing to burn alive with her children, this again is not mysterious to me, because there doesn't seem to be a disconnect between their evident thinking and my own.
There's a minimal level of abundance below which people can't survive. In the industrialized parts of the modern world, we experience abundance that is so hilariously far above that threshold that it's easy to forget that the threshold exists. But for most people who lived throughout most of human history, that threshold was extremely salient to their lives some nontrivial fraction of the time.
It is informative that your example compares the experience of the ruling family of one of the world's mightiest states at the time against some internet rando. That's not to say the comparison doesn't work -- it works just fine. But I expect you'd find your experiences less reflective of those of a typical farmer at that time than they are of that time's royalty.
It seems to me that the problems of the modern world consist entirely of it being peopled with humans, and that these humans do not seem to have changed in any way across all of recorded history.
This is true now, but if you went back to Europe during the Plague it would have been laughably wrong. We've beaten back most of the non-human problems. The human problems remain, because we're still here and we're still the same hairless apes with pretensions we've always been.
Will murder stop? Will theft even stop?
Nope. But smallpox did stop, and malaria will stop, and polio and starvation and iodine deficiency are mere shadows of the specters they were in centuries past. Our homes are cool in the summer and warm in the winter. We're having this conversation over the internet, a magical network which allows most people in the world to talk to most other people in the world whenever they want to, synchronously or asynchronously depending on their preferences. If we decided that the mere projections of each others' words through rocks we tricked into thinking was insufficient, we could each get into an airplane and meet up at some arbitrary city somewhere in the world at this time tomorrow, probably for less money than we each make in a month.
Yet the idea of a beggar is still relevant, isn't it?
In the first world, beggars largely do not starve.
You point to the lowering of infant mortality, it seems to me that when one set of sorrows decreases, they are replaced by a new set seamlessly
It sure seems to me that when non-human-generated sorrows decrease, they're just gone. Disease does not fight back. Scarcity does not fight back.
It does not seem obvious to me that people now are fundamentally happier than bronze-age peasants four thousand years ago
Would you trade places with a bronze-age peasant from four thousand years ago? Would you expect them to trade places with you?
hanikrummihundursvin
4hr ago
You’re ignoring the obvious counter point, which is “it is useful for children to learn to interact productively with people that neither look, act, nor think like them, lest they become unemployable social outcasts.”
This is a counter point to what? Homeschooling works great, sex segregated schools work great. Highly homogenous schools work great. Where are you getting the impression kids from these backgrounds are growing up to be social outcasts?
If your child is the smartest person in their school, then it is likely they will continue to be one of the smartest people wherever they go.
I highly doubt that. Maybe if they're in a very big school, but even then there are a lot of smart cookies in the world.
Learning to interact with 100 IQ “subhumans” is essential to becoming anything more than a white collar grunt who takes orders for a living.
What even is this... Like, I don't know where you are coming from but you don't need to go to school with brown people to learn how to interact with people who have lower IQ's than you.
But this is all very much besides the point, which is that the people proposing these changes, like the one in the article, are not proposing we do this for the benefit of the white children. Your attempts to tease out some necessitated benefit after this has been pointed out are bizarre to a point of self refutation.
stolen_brawnze
I am the way Sia says "batteries" in that one song.
5hr ago
I was trying to eat my lunch downtown when I read this and you had me crying.
I was once rescued from a dream in which I was at my dad's funeral trying to say some words about him. I was roused and told I was whimpering and hyperventilating in my sleep. I'm sorry OP.
srf0638
5hr ago
This strikes me as a touch overcooked. BAP is quite willing to go on about "shtetlbillies", and Sailer regularly talks about the perversity of Jewish support for immigration and the failure of high-achieving American Jews to show appropriate noblesse oblige.
stolen_brawnze
I am the way Sia says "batteries" in that one song.
5hr ago
Aw shit, I had a comment typed up, but it was culture war related for obvious reasons.
Is she the one who brought up trans people in her stand-up set? If so she probably knew she was playing with fire. If this was thrust upon her while trying to work the crowd then that's a regrettable occupational hazard and increases the chance that she apologizes.
Who_Cares
6hr ago
You’re ignoring the obvious counter point, which is “it is useful for children to learn to interact productively with people that neither look, act, nor think like them, lest they become unemployable social outcasts.”
If your child is the smartest person in their school, then it is likely they will continue to be one of the smartest people wherever they go. Learning to interact with 100 IQ “subhumans” is essential to becoming anything more than a white collar grunt who takes orders for a living.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
6hr ago
Yup, it’s got the cool little lever safety by your thumb. I’m told you can break something in the firing group if you engage it after the bolt has been removed. Maybe that’s why it didn’t catch on?
ToZanarkand
6hr ago
Yes, it does not explain why Jews may choose to get into politics,
Do Jews go disproportionately into politics? They're not exactly under-represented in scientific fields, or finance (hence all the stereotypes), law, medicine etc.
Glassnoser
6hr ago
One of the things thay largely discredited Eliezer Yudkowsky in my eyes is when he, only about a year or so ago, said he had been worried about it being too difficult to align AI for it to be safe and hadn't considered that people might just deliberately design unaligned AI. It should have been obvious that this would happen and so the primary concern should always have been what to do about adversarial AI, not how to align AI, which I have never believed would be difficult anyway, and have become less and less concerned about over time.
The modal true believing Nazi is a hateful bigot, the modal true believing WPATH person is someone who cares a lot about trying to alleviate suffering even if circumstances tragically end up such that they are causing more suffering.
Yeah, I've been hearing that argument for years, with Nazis vs. Commies. I never quite bought it, but nowadays I'm buying it even less.
Take another example: should Christians take the excesses of the Crusades, the Inquisition, and witch trials as cautionary tales about what can happen with too much religious zeal, or just go "haha, I guess things got out of hand, but at least their heart was in the right place"?.
WPATH people didn't "tragically end up" causing harm, it was an inevetible consequence of their progressive zeal. They were literally warned about it, and they rejected those warnings over and over.
I suppose my entire point is that trying to alleviate suffering too much can be just as bad as being a hateful bigot, and progressives have a really hard time reckoning with that.
ToZanarkand
6hr ago
Sounds like a good way to generate energy?
gattsuru
6hr ago
Sure, they'll take into account the consequences of gender treatments, and they'll try to make sure that patient's "transition goals" are within the realm of physical possibility, but there should be no other limits placed otherwise. It feels like they flipped the table. What I thought was a conversation about the state of medical science turns out to be a fight over who's worldview should prevail.
I think the steelman also includes a number of concerns about a patient's long-term interests and what they'll desire afterward, but yes, for the most part the Blue Tribe medical community position has been much closer to the tumblr/Ozy gender anarchy than to the medical necessity framework for about a decade now.
(and, correspondingly, they've not really struggled with the extent that the mental health component and especially suicide risk was no small part of what permitted under traditional analysis that they're, if unintentionally, rejecting)
That said, while I think you're directionally correct, I will push back on:
This seems to be the only explanation that can make sense out of the whole thing... why they pull the knives out for Lisa Littman and the ROGD hypothesis or Blanchard's categorization of trans people, while remaining unbothered by Dianne Ehrensaft's gender angels and gender Tootsie Roll Pops.
I think there's another plausible explanation: they think, with reason, that Blanchard's autogynophilia theories seems factually wrong, in their common form and any form but their weakest, and that Blanchard (advocates, such as Bailey) seem unwilling to engage seriously with counterexamples.
((Yes, I absolutely see and agree with the irony, here. There's reason you aren't very happy with WPATH sticking fingers in ears about detransitioners, right?))
As a metaphor that I do have deeper insight in, I'll point to other examples of what Bailey et all call Erotic Target Identity Inversion: treatment of fursuiting or feral-focused furries as 'autoanthrozoophilia' and 'autozoophilia', respectively. In this model, furries who fursuit do so solely because they're aroused by being seen as anthros/animals, and that this ties into the feelings of species dysphoria.
That's not just something I made up to strawman the Blanchard/Bailey perspective, but one that Bailey highlighted himself. While the terms are (almost certainly intentionally) a little weird and loaded, there actually are people who fit into the categories that they're trying to describe, and I can even give number of online psuedonyms for people who do things like transformation kink or where otherwise 'being their character' is a good part of the erotic purpose. And I'll admit that while the community isn't always adult-oriented, a lot of it is.
So these theories must be true?
Well, no, because there's more to the actual theory than just its name: each of these theories include some level of predictive analysis, such that the presence of an autogyne or autoanthrophile says something broader about most of all of the remaining community. In Bailey's take, the presence of some number of (bisexual or gynophilic) transwomen who hide arousal from dressing as a woman meant that almost all (bisexual or gynophilic) transwoman claiming a lack of such arousal were just not willing to disclose it. Many advocates for 'autozoophilia' as a theory take this even further, to mean every person, categorically, achieving certain therian practices must also have such a sexual interest first.
Which doesn't seem to be the case in the furry and therian world, and it's not particularly hard to find (common!) exceptions. There's a lot of overlap between therians and furries, but there's definitely non-furry therians, and not all furry therians are in it for the sex. Where there is a sexual component to the fandom interest, some people often just want to get railed by a Space!Roman chubby wolf, rather than imagine themselves as 'being' or becoming one. By contrast, a lot of the various fursuit and therian practices aren't arousing; "fursuit_bowling" unsurprisingly turns up zero examples on e621, therian meditation had a buuunch of weird results and 'get a boner' basically never shows up, and in the modern day mirror-dwellers don't get that sort of response.
((The first counterargument is that they're all lying, but all I can say there is that I'm not, and for a universal position a single counterexample is fatal. The second counterargument is that some rare outliers exist, but most people are lying, and I'm skeptical: there's none of the medical pragmatic arguments that, and when it comes to embarrassment... I'll avoid some of the more bizarre or detailed points, but for a relatively tame example, I don't think the fursuiter with a nickname of 'pool toy' would be worried about that.))
There's pragmatic reasons these theories are concerning -- non-autogynophile and non-autoanthrophile fursuiters or non-autozoophile therians want neither sexual practices permitted in public nor their non-sexual practices from being restricted -- but even before you get that far there's a certain Someone Is Wrong On The Internet about things. It'd be like some sexologist making weird Pepe Silvia diagrams from people who find motorcyles empowering to talking about how people who change their own oil get off on it: I'm sure it happens somewhere, but no. Just no.
Crap like Keo-Meier/Ehrensaft (in addition to just being creepy) speak badly about the intellectual honesty or commitment to actual outreach to the unconverted: even as someone who's thrown together a list I recognize couldn't be all-inclusive, they're got a muddled mess of ingroup terms without any real inclusive or exclusive meaning.
That's all there is, though. It's not even predictive enough to be wrong.
orthoxerox
I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink
6hr ago
Beyond what YT and Reddit throw at you? No, the lack of information is not the problem, the overabundance of it is.
Do squats and find a pull-up bar.
FiveHourMarathon
The Gun Would Go Off
6hr ago
I'm just going to register my schadenfreude at Sailer, BAP, et Al. This is probably a prime good usage of "but I didn't think they would eat MY face" meme, n'est pas?
Jewish HBDers, racists, etc send the message that my Aunt Hilda was 100% right about niggers, and probably correct in a limited way about 'Ricans too; but then they do this dance as to why she was completely wrong about Kikes.
But to say that Jews only contributed to it by force of their desire to assimilate is just so preposterous and contradicted by an enormous body of evidence of all forms that I find it hard to believe someone of Sailer's caliber falls victim to it. When Sailer sees someone say something like "IQ is just a measure of how good you are at taking tests, nothing important" that's how I feel seeing Sailer, BAP, Yarvin, 2rafa all say something so implausible like Jewish contributions to 20th century intellectual movements were motivated by their intense desire to assimilate to White American Protestant values.
I feel similarly when people tell me that HBD is obviously true, because "evolution didn't stop at the neck;" then are shocked Pikachu when people start dusting off the conniving greedy Jew stereotype and say "no no no we were just talking about IQ!" Maybe, but before iq tests were invented the differences you purport to notice existed, why can't other metrics exist even if we haven't found how to measure them yet?
some
6hr ago
(As an aside.)
Superman supported — in comic books and on a wildly successful radio program — the New Deal, open immigration, and entering the war against Hitler. Some episodes of the radio show lampooned the KKK.
He also foiled, imaginary, schemes of interned Japanese against America and rationalized said camps. Since FDR is considered by progressives of today to have been on the wrong side of that one, it gets minimized and, in this case of this article, even omitted.
A contrast emerges: there was contemporaneous opposition to slavery by creators of culture, which produced works such as Uncle Tom's Cabin. Internment camps were, however, condoned by even progressive producers of media of their time and any work of art which speaks ill of the camps, was made after 1945.
ThisIsSin
Tomboys: transgender or transcendental?
6hr ago
I tried to go for "pistols that are still relatively unique in the grand scheme of things"; the Steyr-Hahn is clip-fed (and the "ejects all the rounds into your face if you press the 'slide release'" one), M1935s (well, one of them, can't remember which) are stupidly-accurate proto-P210s in a caliber that you can actually get/make now, the Webleys are top-break revolvers, the M1917s shoot .45ACP from moon clips, the Tokarev is a Colt 1903 firing lighter projectiles at ~1500 FPS, and Nambus are... uh, pretty weird. It's unfortunate that the weird German designs are as expensive as they are, because the P38 is pedestrian by comparison even though it is the successor to the C96 with that locking block design.
Come to think of it, does the No. 4 still do the thing the No. 1s do where you can slingshot the safety off when the rifle's cocked? I've never seen anyone ever talk about either rifle having that function (which to my knowledge no other rifle does).
EverythingIsFine
6hr ago
Well I'm glad that you acknowledge that your entire argument is predicated on the belief that child-on-child, permanent-consequence outright violence is inevitable (or at least highly likely) to occur in deliberate group-mixing.
I take strong exception to that. I think your belief that somehow placing your presumably-white kid in with your thinly-veiled majority Black school has a significant chance of landing them in the hospital or something is unsupported and warped by media perceptions and fearmongering. Sure, we can go and agree that many Black communities have a violence problem. I think there's a high amount of overlap with poverty, of course, but sure. But this doesn't happen on every level. I would concede, of course, that changing school administration away from a "forgive everything" paradigm might be needed to make this work of course.
I am aware and acknowledge your concern about how using kids to break a negative, self-reinforcing cycle feels a bit bad. But seriously, what else can we do? It's very well established that exposing kids to people different than them is by and large very effective at helping them understand that different is not necessarily bad. And it's not even all about race. Kids can very, very easily fall into bubbles far more easily than adults. My younger sister, for example, went through a phase in middle school where she was upset that our family vacations were only in-country because "everyone" was going to France or Hawaii or the Carribean or such. Which blew my mind because (at the time parents were upper-middle class and still are) at least part of my upbringing was in lower-middle class areas where I was quite aware that many families don't actually take family vacations hardly at all! That's just a small and trivial example. There are far more serious ones. Kids are sponges and need deliberate exposure to other ways of being and living while young.
So I'd challenge this whole paradigm that parents are being somehow brainwashed by SJW-stuff into putting their kids in danger for no real return. Rather, I would like parents to acknowledge the time-lag danger of accidentally raising an intolerant, ignorant, or sheltered child. And yes, that means that once in a while, a parent should go "I don't think my child has enough perspective and will be a more kind, well-rounded person if I break them out of their bubble a bit". This goes for many aspects of parenting. What you're proposing is exactly the same worldview as helicopter/lawnmower/bulldozer parenting and shares the exact same issues! Kids need to confront some sucky parts of life at some point, you can't coddle them forever! Learning interventions are best done young, just like how we now tell kids up-front they were adopted and that's fine rather than try and hide it until some future teenage moment.
Again, in case I lost some focus: the whole point of my post is to point out that otherwise-benign and rational actions like the self-sorting only when in strongly minority situations can have severe, negative consequences for society at large. Think of it like a game theory problem. All we need is to tweak the rules slightly and we can fix the game! In this case, acknowledging that there are negative consequences of growing up in excessive homogeneity.
Wouldn't you love a world where we don't have this 13% for half the violence stuff? We can get that world. America's violence problem is an aberration world-wide, which should be a clue that it's fixable. We aren't somehow doomed or powerless to simply attempt to live our lives in fear of radical violence. We are the architects of our own fate.
And what maybe considered the most important part by people here is the law enforcement that while far from perfect for example both in Poland and in Russia(still much worse in the latter) does work at keeping streets safe, public transit clean and gangs non-existent(apart from the ones that get in with the government but that's a different story). I think democratic politicians can achieve this kind of integration and they have reason to do it, YIMBY i.e. urbanist faction becomes more powerful by the day in the local elections
Of course Democrats could do this. But they won't. In Poland and Russia, if some minorities are caught up more in these sorts of QOL policing policies, c'est la vie.
The entire reason Democrats have experimented with ruinous crime "reform" that has ruined some cities (against the very self-interest you appeal to) is that they consider this fundamentally delegitimizing. Their natural response to seeing some people fall below standards is to try to destroy the standard
So, yes. The urbanists could have their good transit and clean and safe downtowns and it could be a mocha paradise where all of the prosocial people of all races gather, but this would require simply slicing off the bits of each demographic that can't hack it. And they have gone down a radicalization rabbit hole that renders them ideologically (and maybe even legally) incapable of doing it when it appears those slices won' be equal. The people admiring Netherlands' bikes and trains and Tokyo's policies are the same sorts of people that cannot abide what that would cost, even if we posit that it'd only have to be short erm
So segregation will persist, as people with wherewithal flee this chaos.
To make a long story short: If you care about your group you want people who care about your group in charge. Ben Shapiro doesn't care about the 'white America' group at all. This bleeds into his rhetoric. He does, however, care a lot about Israel. If he cared as much about white America as he did Israel there would be no problems, but he obviously doesn't.
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