domain:alexberenson.substack.com
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2hr ago
But I say this as someone who remembers original Facebook where you just got a feed of stuff your friends posted, in chronological order, without the site itself trying to guess what you would find most engaging/catering to your worst impulses directly.
I remember this era as well (Facebook recently "shared a memory" old enough to vote). My dark-ish take is that very public efforts for "trust and safety" failed miserably because the median user looked at the drama that was strongly associated with "trust and safety" and decided that the site felt neither trusted nor safe for sharing going forward. Maybe it was inevitable, but it felt like a decent chunk of it was an own goal on the part of the social media companies.
roystgnr
2hr ago
Even if you limit the process to the same supposed mechanism as the Slavs, "please rule us to provide an impartial judge for our feuds", Slavs wouldn't be the only example of that Stranger King theory - Wiki lists cases in the Pacific, Iceland, and Sri Lanka (although the latter swiftly regretted it).
Wiki doesn't list the Slavs, though. IIRC when I looked into it the historians' consensus was that in their case it was a false narrative invented by writers centuries later.
YE_GUILTY
2hr ago
For a moment I read that as "prisons" and my mind ran off with a metaphor for how kinds of criminality may be overwritten and replaced, often with something worse, by exposure to other inmates-
-But then I read it correctly.
TheFooder
2hr ago
Really...Hanania said that? Another reason to dismiss him as a fool. It should have been obvious from the start the bromance would sour over time. Had it been a prediction market (I was aware of...) I would have definitely taken that bet, though I must admit the honeymoon laster longer than I expected.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2hr ago
I think we see this sort of backwards. People who make their politics, religion, or sexuality the center of their personality generally are not emotionally healthy. TBH, I think we have an ongoing mental health crisis that’s manifesting itself through politics.
There used to be a normal way to do politics when I was a kid in the 1980s and 1990s. Sure people had an interest in politics, but it was nothing like today. For one thing, the thought of breaking a friendship over politics was something that didn’t occur to people. You disagreed, even argued, but you were still friends and still did things together. And furthermore, politics was just one thing among several that a person might be interested in. There would be other things, TV shows, sports, cars, art, music, and hobbies that took up most of people’s time and attention. It was a much healthier way to do politics, and frankly made for better politics. When people tune out, it’s possible for the leadership to stop posturing and campaigning and start governing.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
Nondenominationals are theologically Baptist, but in practice strongly tend to be a bit more liberal than baptists are, not necessarily politically. Nondenominational churches near me run ministries for trial marriages, which baptists at the least would frown upon.
You’re right that virtually none of them are going to be OK with gay marriages. But this is probably more ‘how she chose to frame her disagreement with the church’ than the disagreement itself.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2hr ago
but he's got over 40% of SpaceX, which at its latest valuation gives him more like $135B capital there.
Was it actually sold to anyone at that price? Even stonk market valuations are often nothing more than memes, but at least they have an advantage of being an actual market price.
Nah, but they've been flat for 2 years after skyrocketing for the previous 2.
-13% worldwide sounds like declining, especially with the rest of the EV market growing. -50% in Europe does indeed sound like "tanking".
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
There are lots of women with very similar original views to Lana, who are moderately religious and married to Trump supporting men, and who do not personally like Trump. Few of them get divorced- probably fewer than average.
Rather than radicalization leading to divorce, I’d think divorce leads to radicalization. Their marriage doesn’t seem to have been going to well to begin with.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2hr ago
SpaceX has a hell of a lot of long-term government and military contracts.
Yes, some of them are even nearly overdue, and are fixed priced, no matter how many Starships get blown up!
Starship is just the flashy sports car to create brand awareness, and potentially develop future capabilities.
His Artemis contract depends on it working, and even then I have huge doubts about their galaxy-brained plan of a dozen refuels per trip to the moon.
The cost of the Starship project is quite small compared to the SpaceX bottom line
1-2 billion per year according to Musk himself. What's their bottom line?
WhiningCoil
2hr ago
I mean, yes. But also, that requires a lower time preference than most narcissist are capable of. They don't want to give up attention now for more attention later. They want all the attention, right now, all the time. And especially their exact favorite type of attention, not a different type that's better in some ways and worse in others.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2hr ago
While numerically having 50% of the launches, the Falcon family put more than 90% of the total mass into orbit
Yes, I've heard all that. Most of these are in-house for Starlink, and Musk is on record screaming at his employees that without Starship they won't be making much (any? He just said "poor financials") money with it.
Just please, won't someone show the actual profit the company is making. Literally none of this "dominance" matters if it can't bail out his failing endeavors.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
2hr ago
This is fair, but I would also add that this shifts the incentives for therapists as well, towards mechanisms of therapy that are "easier," or more "humanistic" for patients. The humanistic school announces just what you've outlined as a point of pride:
More than any other therapy, Humanistic-Existential therapy models democracy. It imposes ideologies of others upon the client less than other therapeutic practices. Freedom to choose is maximized. We validate our clients' human potential.
The academics whose studies are always presented as evidence for the effectiveness of therapy almost universally practice strict cognitive-behavioral therapy, which explicitly involves persisting in important activites despite negative feelings, acting on carefully-reasoned directions rather than following emotions, and trying to clearly understand how your actions affect other people. In other words -- exactly what someone whose negative emotions harm themselves or others needs (emphasis mine):
- Human emotions are primarily caused by people's thoughts and perceptions rather than events.
- Events, thoughts, emotions, behaviors, and physiological reactions influence each other.
- Dysfunctional emotions are typically caused by unrealistic thoughts. Reducing dysfunctional emotions requires becoming aware of irrational thoughts and changing them.
- Human beings have an innate tendency to develop irrational thoughts. This tendency is reinforced by their environment.
- People are largely responsible for their own dysfunctional emotions, as they maintain and reinforce their own beliefs.
- Sustained effort is necessary to modify dysfunctional thoughts, emotions, and behaviors.
- Rational thinking usually causes a decrease in the frequency, intensity, and duration of dysfunctional emotions, rather than an absence of affect or feelings.
- A positive therapeutic relationship is essential to successful cognitive therapy.
- Cognitive therapy is based on a teacher-student relationship, where the therapist educates the client.
- Cognitive therapy uses Socratic questioning to challenge cognitive distortions.
- Homework is an essential aspect of cognitive therapy. It consolidates the skills learned in therapy.
- The cognitive approach is active, directed, and structured.
- Cognitive therapy is generally short.
- Cognitive therapy is based on predictable steps.
It does strike me as funny that a lot of criticisms of therapy culture you see on the motte and elsewhere are essentially that therapy should be just that -- short, goal-oriented, placing a great deal of responsibility on patients, focused on behaviors rather than emotions, emphasizing change instead of validation. If all therapy were like that, it would be a much better profession!
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
Thé kids would’ve been too old for that, wouldn’t they? Trans kids weren’t a thing until very recently, and it sounds like the kids weren’t exactly babies at their divorce.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
2hr ago
In the case of rationalists, it's not even a point as major as seed oil disrespect among the "bronze age warriors,"
I think youre off on that. Both groups have people who are really into that thing, but those people are much more central to rationalism. I remember a compatriot who would drink pumpkin seed oil (its a thing in styria) neat as countersignalling and he never had problems.
Also, I think going bald is actually not the end of the world. I would on balance advice not messing with your hormones over it, unless youre 20 or something.
I'd push back because yes, the kids start drawing attention, but mom, as the arbiter of who gets to interact with the baby, also gets a lot of attention and, if the child appears to be doing well, accolades for raising them.
So to the non-narcissists who don't mind sharing the spotlight, this is a boon.
Indeed, this is probably the only way a woman can keep herself centered in attention in her thirties and forties, short of being a literal celebrity.
birb_cromble
2hr ago
Isn't this a similar mechanism to how prions work?
birb_cromble
2hr ago
and then meanwhile, there's this giant elephant in the room.
C'mon man, she's family. You don't have to name call like that.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
2hr ago
When I was a kid, in the 80s, where I lived, Ronald Reagan was the good czar, and all the lingering bad old strife from the 70s was going to be put behind us, because it was all a great misunderstanding, with the government getting way too out of line with the real Americans and needing to be put back in its place. And liberal was a dirty word to tar people with. I didn't understand what had happened, of course, but I could just feel it, overwhelmingly, from all the adults in my life.
As I got older and further from that past, it seemed less and less real, like some sort of giant ridiculous propaganda coup... especially by the Clinton years (New Democrats didn't look anything like what I had been told, right?) And especially by the awfulness of the George W. Bush years. It got really easy to think that all the adults in my life, back in the 80s, had just been misled by propaganda and that era's equivalent of Fox News.
All of which made the 2010s deeply harrowing and shocking for me, especially as I had already steered my adult life in the assumption that much of what I had been told as a kid wasn't true. But early in the 2010s, it dawned on me, watching the mounting personal wreckage of political radicalization from people in my own personal life, especially women of a certain sort, exactly why those adults I had grown up around had loathed the 70s so intensely. "The personal is political" might be an interesting airy political theory, but as a lived practice, it clearly utterly breaks a lot of normal people into quivering, non-functional shards who can't recover from it.
I have a half-sister, twelve years younger than me, who went very much through a similar arc to Lana (I have never been especially close to her). She started out quite conservatively religious. And now she's got three kids, lives in a polycule and her various gendered lovers with her despairing, rather unwilling cuckold husband, has gone down the double mastectomy route, is mainlining T and showing off her beard and armpit hair on social media, and writes borderline suicidal posts from time to time about how the only people who will respond to her at this point are online activist LGBTQ friends, as everyone in her normal life is done with her. I'm probably "misgendering" her here, but I blocked her a while ago on Facebook, so I really only get updates second hand through my sister. And my half-sister has a litany of internet disabilities and conditions, can't leave the bed most days, and has made nasty allegations about several members of her family about abuse in the past, none of which are backed up by any of her many siblings. It's horrible to watch, especially given the children involved. I think she would have had a rocky mental health experience in life no matter what, as it runs in the family. But she's clearly been stewing in social influences that make everything far, far worse, and amplify her hardest tendencies... And I've seen milder versions of this play out the last several years in other cases, too!
It's vaguely interesting that there's this "public" conversation about incels and online radicalization of young guys (which, I mean, sure, there's a plausible discussion there), and then meanwhile, there's this giant elephant in the room.
TitaniumButterfly
2hr ago
I likewise enjoyed The Primal Hunter, though I did find the text a touch on the dry side. I'll probably buy the sequel at some point
Yikes, yeah, failed to mention that I did the same thing. Book one was okay. I went like half a year before getting book 2, which is when things start to take off. It does get better. Not as good as anything in the recommended section though.
birb_cromble
3hr ago
Auto correct is a hell of a drug
pigeonburger
3hr ago
Main problem with therapy is that unless it is mandated by someone else, a therapist is chosen by his patient. So it's likely that the patient will seek out a therapist that tells them what they want to hear rather than what they should hear.
FtttG
3hr ago
Therapy might well work for people who really need it, but for those who don't, it may end up either being a massive waste of time or actively making their lives worse (or the lives of their loved ones).
80-90% of therapists seem to be strongly left-leaning women and a whole lot of those are single. I must imagine that women coming to them for marital help tend to get pushed hard in certain directions.
If I need marriage counseling I'll be going to a priest, and I'm not even sure that's a less-politically-neutral act.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
3hr ago
I don't know that the conquest of large sections of the world were really expressions of Christian love, even if Christianity was often invoked as legitimating force and Christian voices often called for temperance in colonial activities in the name of the Gospel (i.e. Bartolomé de las Casas).
98% of people with a record believe that the law as written is fair, but they and their friends are being railroaded by the man. Prisoners would not vote to legalize theft/shorten sentences. They would vote like normal poor people, except they might support more of an anti-cop platform.
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