domain:nfinf.substack.com
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2hr ago
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
2hr ago
Nobody wants to admit that because the idea that madness is something you can catch is an extremely disturbing idea. Almost Lovecraftian.
I find it weird people don't have those qualms about PTSD. But then again we refused to believe it was a thing for a long time.
This is probably the most disturbing post I have ever made here. As a Southeast Asian, I need to talk about all the war crimes Adam Ragusea committed against pad thai in this video:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=puHSU9ZaZPY
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too much sugar in recipe
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advocates using worcestershire sauce in pad thai
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puts soy sauce in pad thai
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puts ketchup in pad thai
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snaps rice noodles in half
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boils rice noodles instead of soaking in warm water
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uses what looks like extra virgin olive oil to cook everything
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no tofu
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puts green onions and cilantro in the dish (the only herb that goes into pad thai is garlic chives)
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uses fresh chili instead of dried chili flakes
Every step is wrong. Every step. This is the first time I've come across a recipe of his I actually know something about and he fucks up everywhere.
I can't believe a certain orange-shirted YouTuber hasn't reviewed this yet, honestly.
nobody knows what a paraphilia is
Of course we do. It's obsessive sexual target error.
The exact causes or how alterable the phenomenon is is subject to lots of debate, but it's obscurantist nonsense to claim the category has no merit. It makes specific falsifiable claims.
For all of the issues with it, I'd like people to actually provide scientific arguments against Blanchardianism instead of "nuh-uh" and "my politics say this is badwrong".
ThisIsSin
Cainanites and Abelists
3hr ago
I admit I can't explain why "feminist" in the public imagination is sex-positive.
Boomers' cultural worldview of feminism is stuck in the '70s, which is the last time that was true.
The side of feminism comprising the modern #fightfor25/Junior Anti-Sex League wouldn't get back to the same rent-seeking position on sex it had in the early 20th century until after AIDS.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
3hr ago
Oh they exist alright. They become more noticeable 30s and onwards as all the loving people slowly select themselves into relationships.
Good news is that it's curable, I've seen people grow out of it. But not everyone does.
CertainlyWorse
No one is coming. It's just you.
3hr ago
A large part of modern seduction theory involves redirecting any conversations about commitment during the early stages. This is so no promises need to be made while dangling an implied possibility of a relationship at least until after sex. No lying except perhaps by omission.
Not all men put the above into practice however. Some genuinely aren't sure if they want a relationship with the woman until things progress.
That's not even getting to the women that are very willing to (or even prefer to) have sex without commitment.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3hr ago
· Edited 3hr ago
After watching the video and some others on the same channel, it seems mostly interesting as a really extreme example of the art of generating gravitas by speaking slowly and pausing a lot. Somehow, he manages to get you to slow down your mental clock to match the pace of his speech, rather than getting bored or distracted.
(And yes, he does come across as wise and witty, but a lot of people could probably muster this level of wit if they actually could take that long to decide what to say without losing their audience. The ability to keep the listener suspended seems to be key.)
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3hr ago
But the middle is a rather anodyne thing: acknowledge that excessive sex-positively drives behavior that makes neither men nor women satisfied, while at the same time acknowledging that total abstinence outside of marriage is neither desirable nor achievable.
I'll agree that total abstinence outside of marriage isn't achievable at the population level; humans will inevitably human. In what way is it not desirable or achievable at the individual level? If a guy and a girl abstain from sex outside of marriage, get married, and so cease to abstain from sex inside marriage, what has this cost them?
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4hr ago
I feel like "emotional labor" is among the most toxic memes to come out of feminism, in the actual near-Lovecraftian sense that it insinuates itself into your world model and begs you to cleave reality at that particular joint to your permanent detriment as a human being. I'm not even in the target group, but every time I get even a little frustrated dealing with someone else's mental state (like, say, listening to a friend complain about how they were avoiding their advisor even though they and I had gone through the "I'm having [unfounded anxiety] and rationally I just need to psyche myself up to send that email already" conversation path many times already) the idea floats up and wants me to start keeping score.
urquan
Every one who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.
4hr ago
Their description of what testosterone does to their mental processes sounds completely alien to me. I cannot relate to it whatsoever.
Can you give some examples? What I can recall is trans men talking about becoming incredibly and uncontrollably horny after starting T, and, well, not to put too fine a point on it, but that seems reasonably accurate to the experience of any man who’s ever gone through puberty.
urquan
Every one who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.
4hr ago
So when some socially adept and quite rapacious men figure out that there's an ample supply of idiots out there who just need a meager offering of romance-lit aesthetics and who can't initiate or sustain a real romance from their own abilities, they have no idea of how to approach romance from... well, not exactly an adversarial stance, but at least an active one, where you accept the base fact that life between man and woman (possibly man and man or woman and woman, not much personal insight there) is always a negotiation and you need to stake out your own ground to get what you want.
This is a really long sentence — can you clarify who doesn’t know how to approach a relationship from an adversarial stance?
OliveTapenade
4hr ago
(And I say this as someone who likes playing around with tarot imagery but don't treat it as serious.)
In the hope of trying to find something more positive to talk about -
I wonder if there are any other Motters with a passing interest in tarot? I used to be fascinated by it as well. I give no credence whatsoever to divination, but I think the imagery of the tarot is extraordinarily rich and multi-faceted. Its supposed divinatory powers, I hazard, have more to do with the way that that imagery is both endlessly open to interpretation and psychologically provocative. If you find yourself mentally 'stuck', a randomised pile of images from the tarot may well give you the jolt you need to consider new perspectives.
I don't use it for advice myself, but I can still appreciate the symbolic language it provides. If there are any other Motters familiar with it, maybe it's worth a chat in the Fun Thread one day?
Clearly I'm coming at this from the angle of someone who naturally had these hormones all my life, so I can't speak as to what it would be like to experience the effects for the first time.
This has always fascinated me when I read accounts by trans men. Their description of what testosterone does to their mental processes sounds completely alien to me. I cannot relate to it whatsoever. There are a number of possible explanations for that, one of which is, indeed, that I've had this level of testosterone all my life, and my body is accustomed to it. It's just part of the way I think, and any downsides or difficulties that come with it are things that I have had decades of practice compensating for. Someone who suddenly shifted from a much lower level of testosterone to the level of a natal male like me, however, probably would experience it as an overwhelming flood, and that might explain, for instance, them having problems with impulse control that I have never had.
If so I can only guess that it's plausible that a natal male suddenly taking a much higher dose of estrogen would experience a similar shock, but in the other direction, and that it would be something that natal women cannot relate to either.
Of course, as the top-level poster mentioned, it also seems likely that there's some element of placebo as well. If you're telling yourself that you're taking a chemical that's going to make your more feminine or girly, well, you can probably just think yourself into that absent any chemical effects at all. All the more so if you're also making intentional behavioural or social changes. So plenty of grains of salt seem warranted here.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4hr ago
Matter of fact, it has been my fetish ever since that one time I dated a math grad student with impostor syndrome.
anti_dan
4hr ago
So it begs the question: what, exactly, is she advocating for? Quite frankly, I’m not sure. If I had to guess, I think she wants a secular, sexually conservative sororiarchy, where women watch out for their gender’s collective interests and stop each other from undercutting their bids. Either way, an interesting point of view.
This, I don't think is confusing at all. Shes advocating for feminism with only the benefits. It is a common occurrence. Its not outside the realm of fantasy. Imagine a world where men could just point at a woman and say "I want" and she has to have sex with him 7 days a week and bear him 15 children. That is the reality that many think used to exist. It never did, of course, which is why the counter to it is so deranged, but here we are.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4hr ago
The term has been floating around in the self-help literature sphere, and even made it onto Wiktionary (which claims that it's chiefly used in "philosophy"). I would assume that it was introduced by people who didn't want their poetic self-help goals tarnished by association with the more prosaic readings of "meaningful" (like not of insignificant scale or impact, not nonsensical, etc.): if you say you are striving for meaningfulness, some are bound to read it as a win-friends-and-influence-people sort of thing.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
4hr ago
Supermarkets are on thin margins and yet you have manyfold increase in the price from farm to table.
They have thin margins but they make it up by turning over inventory quickly. This doesn't mean supermarkets aren't profitable, just that taking radical steps to lower prices won't really work because they don't have much room to cut.
People are mad that prices went up 40%
Cutting the supermarket's 4% margin to 3.7% (or whatever) isn't going to matter.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
4hr ago
Maybe! Go craft a message that will be listened to, perhaps even get your Elite Human Capital buddies to help you spread it, and show us how it's done.
Gaashk
4hr ago
Even more than in her previous essay, she doesn't seem to actually like any of her "friends." The men are all cads, the women all fools, and she feels like talking to her female friends about their lives is "emotional labor." Is she also suffering from "dark triad" behavior, and honest, emotionally stable people keep their distance?
OliveTapenade
4hr ago
While the word 'religion' isn't indigenous to this context, there is definitely a Chinese sense that the Confucian school, so to speak, is the same sort of thing as Daoism or Buddhism. This is depicted allegorically, and indeed forms the 'three traditions', as you term them.
Speaking of language, the Chinese term for Confucianism is 儒教 (rújiào) - the former character means 'scholar', and the latter means 'teaching', 'school', or sometimes 'religion'. Confucianism is the teaching of the scholars. I bring this up because it's similar to the names of schools that are uncontestedly considered 'religions' in the West. Daoism is 道教 (dàojiào, 'teaching of the way'), Buddhism is 佛教 (fójiào, 'teaching of the Buddha'), Christianity is 基督教 (jīdūjiào, 'teaching of Jesus', this term tends to have a more Protestant connotation), Catholicism is 天主教 (tiānzhujiào, 'teaching of the lord of heaven'), Protestantism specifically is 新教 (xīnjiào, 'new teaching'), Islam is 伊斯蘭教 (yīsīlánjiào, 'teaching of Islam', they just transliterated the name directly; 回, huí, is also common for Chinese Muslims as an ethnicity), and so on.
The point is that linguistically these all seem to be treated like different species of the one family - they are all types of jiào. Not all ideologies or systems of belief are jiào. For instance, communism, liberalism, and fascism, in Chinese, are all called 主義 (zhuyì, which means 'position' or 'doctrine'). The word jiào suggests something roughly similar to our word 'religion'.
The historical context, as hydroacetylene alludes to, is that Matteo Ricci and some of the early Jesuits in China really didn't want Confucianism to be a religion, because they liked Confucianism. If Confucianism is not a religion then Chinese people don't have to give it up in order to become Christians, which is obviously very helpful if you want to convert a bunch of elite Confucians, as Ricci did. (This is also why the name for Catholicism is so bizarre - Ricci tried to equate God with ancient Chinese belief in Heaven or some kind of Lord of Heaven, in order to make the case to the Chinese that embracing Christianity would be consistent with the ways of their ancestors. Interestingly, some modern Chinese Christians try to make a similar move - people like Yuan Zhiming preach pseudohistorical theories whereby ancient Chinese were prophetically proto-Christian. For instance, Zhiming argues that the Chinese character for 'greed', 婪 (lán), depicts a woman standing beneath two trees, suggesting some ancient lost knowledge of the Eden narrative.)
If you ask me, I'm not totally without sympathy for Ricci's approach - a Chinese convert to Christianity is not obligated to abandon everything taught by Confucius, but only those things incompatible with the gospel. Everything else may be retained, and that may well end up being an awful lot. But "Confucianism is a different religion, therefore it must all be thrown out" and "Confucianism is not a religion, therefore it's all fine" are both lazy shortcuts. They're attempts to shortcut past real discernment of the content of a teaching with the cheap label 'religion'.
Even so, if we have to use the label for convenience, I'd say Confucianism is more like a religion than it is not.
anon_
4hr ago
I'm not sure what constitutes "an answer" here -- there isn't some magical answer that ends the human drama over sex. And if there was one, it might not even be a good thing.
But the middle is a rather anodyne thing: acknowledge that excessive sex-positively drives behavior that makes neither men nor women satisfied, while at the same time acknowledging that total abstinence outside of marriage is neither desirable nor achievable.
kky
4hr ago
In all of this, is there any standard of duty, even to herself, that a woman could fail? Or is she always the one failed?
Of course - it's the duty to understand these dynamics and rise above them. Pretty similar to the duty on incels in that regard. Nobody can ever really help you but yourself. And in both cases, the fact remains that the typical support structures that defend adolescents as they try to work this out have been undermined.
There's one particularly salient fact for women, though, which is that they suffer increasingly severe setbacks as they fail to work this particular issue out. Your average man who can't work out appropriate sexual practice has a long runway. There's no real consequence, long-term, of virginity qua virginity. I was a late bloomer myself. It wasn't really a problem - I wound up coming into my own in my mid-twenties with no harm done. Women, on the other hand, are running down the clock of their fertility and the visceral attraction of youth, alongside the concrete health risks of sex and the severe consequence of an unintended pregnancy. A woman in her mid-twenties who only just starts to figure romance out is on a very tight clock, and has to get up to speed on the actual elements of romance, find a good partner, marry said partner, and then start having kids. This has to be a very matter-of-fact business for her to be able to start before 30. Any further errors, like getting stuck with a sweet but unambitious boyfriend and not knowing when/how to pull the plug, will potentially set her further years back. And if she's stuck with a kid, good luck; if she's had an abortion, then it may be easier to date, but it's a concretely bad thing that will stick with her.
And women get cast into this sphere much more aggressively than men, just by virtue of biology. A woman is sexually grown, to a great extent, somewhere in the realm of 18-22. At that point she receives full sexual attention and has to "debut," as it were, whether she's willing or not. Men aren't grown in the same way for several years past that point, when they start to get their careers in order. But wisdom comes at a year-over-year rate regardless of physical growth, and so women are thrown out into the open with some four or five less years of material experience compared to their developmental male peers. Compare how pretty much every woman has some sort of story of going through puberty in her early teens and immediately starting to receive open sexual attention from men, which they are nowhere near ready to handle at that phase. It's the same sort of problem, just at a different stage of life.
So I think it makes sense to say that, given the plain and simple disadvantage women have here, that society can stand to adjust itself a little to buffer women against the worst harms here. I recognize the typical term for this is patriarchy, or possibly paternalism, but it seems to me quite fair to say that people ought to go out of their way to stop men from obviously preying on women in the vulnerable range. The women from the story above are NOT in that vulnerable range - hence losers - but many women are, and do not benefit from getting tossed into the shark tank. For what it's worth, I'd say that men need a parallel kind of deference in childhood, mostly focused on their much delayed organizational skills. A boy who struggles with the rote elements of schoolwork is not necessarily delayed or misbehaving, and comparing him to a girl his age on those merits is quite cruel - and probably why college is getting so lopsided these days (which, in turn, feeds back into the ladies' problem from the start). Or for romance, boys tend to need a lot more mentoring and structure - the few outliers who "get it" tend to really overperform, or you get older men who swoop down to eat the boys' lunch, which is both problems rolled into one.
Maybe my view of the world is more strongly sexed than yours. But I hope I've laid it out fairly clearly, and shown that it isn't all a one-sided affair. On the individual scale, everyone always has nobody but themselves to blame. But on the larger scale, it makes sense to talk about the larger pressures, because those are what determine where the line between success and failure falls.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5hr ago
Have you actually encountered these women who approach relationships by being boss bitches with unchecked neuroticism yourself, or are you reciting a culture war catechism or something you have seen others claim on the internet? I have been through and seen plenty of failure modes of relationships, but nothing like "the woman refuses to be nice, warm, loving or create a positive atmosphere for the sake of political LARPing" has been among them.
No tinkering whatsoever this week. Family maintenance consumes all. Thanks for asking and please keep it up.
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