domain:x.com
erwgv3g34
4d ago
From in His strength, I will dare and dare and dare until I die:
Costco is ENORMOUS. The parking lot must fit hundreds of cars, and on a Saturday afternoon it's mostly full. The shopping carts look practically big enough to drive down the street themselves. They go in through the huge automatic glass doors into a high-ceilinged, concrete-floored, vast echoing room with shelves and shelves and shelves of food. And a lot of things that aren't food, too, clothes and toys and bicycles and electronics and even furniture.
...
It's wonderful. She is not totally flabbergasted, she's been inside a small-for-this-world ethnic grocery store in California, but this is a glorious height of human achievement that belongs among the wonders of the world, and she loves it, and she bounces on her heels and squeals and praises God who made civilization and all who made this bit of it with His hand guiding.
"Everyone should live to see Costco, and Heaven and Hell should have it," she concludes this praise.
TIRM
4d ago
I'm here and I'm not a racist. I'll keep chugging along.
Can we please not be reddit fixated on vote tallies?
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
4d ago
Or you can just like, not let it bother you?
My whole last page of comments got ratio’d and I’m still alive.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
4d ago
I think it’s two things: school and work eat up more time for young people, and algorithms have gotten too brain-frying and addictive. So those ages 13-25 are more stressed than even a decade ago, and at an early age they’ve been driven into low-intellectual low-discussion online spaces. There was once a time you could have long discussions on even YouTube, like over weeks continuing the same conversation, but they changed the design to make it impossible long ago. The design on Instagram also actively prevents discussion. The new Reddit design has also heavily discouraged discussion. For addiction, think about how different the YouTube experience was in 2010 compared to today, not just shorts vs video, but the flashy thumbnails and formulas every large channel uses to maximize engagement. All those techniques increase the sense of novelty and reduce attention span, which winds up making reading and discussion laborious for zoomers.
There aren’t actually any private alternatives to the “old internet”. The closest are group chats and discords, which are qualitatively different and possess other challenges to maintaining discussion. Most of the internet that would have entered discussion in the past (to discuss news / social issues / politics / whatever) engage with the more surface-level apps like Instagram and tiktok and parts of x, usually for being performative and social and “engaging” and curating a vibe to reap social rewards — not really focused on discussion. And then there are the smaller users who just hang around these accounts. Even for film — why discuss film when you could post your lettrbox and put it in your social media profile to get laid? This appears to be the prevailing trend.
Also, I think a lot of boys who would be involved in online discussion are addicted to video games, which have gotten more addicting over the years, and are also probably making memes instead of discussing — at one point, memes and discussion were interlinked in image boards, but now you can post these in apps and gain a small following.
tl;dr cultural decline
Rov_Scam
4d ago
My point is that it would have been of no tangible benefit to Epstein. The prosecutor wasn't in a position to cut any deals, regardless of what information was provided.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
Is that really what they are saying now? I'll be polluting their data by answering "99" in the future.
Probably not, I do not hang out with a lot of wokes. or people generally. :)
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
4d ago
Racism is, after all, the default state of humanity
Like, yes, but also no? Mostly no. First of all, we should probably state that race doesn't really exist. There's nothing inherently, fundamentally, deeply different about human groups. There are some genetic quirks here and there. Sometimes these genetic quirks collect in particular geographical and sexual assortment groupings. But groupings mix and blend like crazy, and different quirks show up, and then sometimes get re-blended, and sometimes groupings get big enough that humans in their constant drive for classifying and categorizing and delineating end up giving them a linguistic label. Sometimes, quite frequently in fact, these linguistic labels end up being poorly applied, but sometimes they are pretty accurate, or the label shifts and stretches to match some underlying grouping. And anyways, these labels very often extend poorly and incompletely to individuals: even a single mixed-race person breaks all the categories.
In this context, the modern (popular) understanding of race is probably less objectively "correct" (insofar as it even makes sense to say) than the more ancient understanding of race. Historically, and I mean by that roughly before the initial advent of genetic theories and eugenics and all that stuff, racism was the case where it applied geographically to clustered sexual assortment groups. And usually (but not even all the time) this worked just fine, because mass migrations and mixings were semi-rare. We should also note that even here, culture and race are basically intertwined quite tightly, because both are primarily geographic and spatial in nature (although culture can spread memetically and through trade links faster than actual sexual interlinkage). These migrations did happen though with some decent regularity, but the typical person alive would have limited exposure to other groups anyways. As especially "empires" grew (typically defined as a cross-cultural/ethnic political entities, as opposed to "kingdoms"), and increasingly leveraged what we could call cultural technologies, you did start to see some differentiation.
But here, it's important to take things into perspective. Locally, skin tone differences due to tanning would imply social things mechanically, but melanin differences were not seen as the primary differentiator, and nor were other ethnic groupings. Empire-wide, you'd get some local-geographical discrimination and categorization, but the interplay with culture was also very important. And even more than culture, social status. If you look at Rome, for example, as a time in history when you had different ethnic groups interacting all over, and frequently (in a relative sense), social standing and nationality seemed to matter much more than localized ethnic groupings inherently. There was this general idea of "barbarians" but that had again more to do with culture than race.
Fast forward. Today, many people think of race as skin color, and maybe a few other scattered traits like facial structure or whatever. This is ahistorical, frankly, at least when it comes to skin color. Slavery really did a number on the country and dichotomized things, for one, and also the modern "categories" are, frankly, terrible, even without skin color explicitly. "Hispanic/Latino" is such a uselessly broad categorization. Brazilian is its own pot of crazy. "Middle Eastern/North African" is like, very loosely its own category but doesn't even show up in many official government questions. We now have this vague notion of "white" which sometimes does and sometimes doesn't include Eastern European origin in addition to Western European origin, and sometimes includes Spaniards but sometimes doesn't, and anyways I'm not going to get into all the (common) edge cases, hopefully you get the idea.
And underneath it all, you have increasing rates of "interracial" kids. Underneath it all, even if you are to try and be scientific about "race", you still have to make a highly controversial and indefensible decision, which is where to "snapshot" racial differences as a baseline. When we are talking about Chinese people, are we talking before or after the Mongol invasion? How local are we going? Are 'Han' Chinese from Northern China different than 'Han' Chinese from near the Vietnam border? Do we distinguish Koreans from Chinese? What about Japanese, who objectively stayed more isolated historically? How linearly do we interpret genetic distance? Is a Japanese person more or less different than a Chinese person vs a White English descent person from a Portuguese? Are we just admitting that we're taking culture and history into account, or are we still insisting on some genetic measure? If we're talking genetic facts, are we allowing for snap judgements?
All this to say that sure, historically humans discriminate, but no, they didn't think of race like we do now. Racism is an obsession of modern discourse, and it just doesn't make sense. Most notably, there's this conflation of culture, nationality, and genetic "race" as one giant construct - often this is lazily referred to as "race", but it really is more broad. Maybe we need a better word.
Now, many people here at the Motte seem to take the tack that so what, categories are imprecise, but all that matters is some kind of "predictive accuracy" for my mental heuristics. Can I predict that a Black-presenting person will rob my store, and does that merit treating them different? These are different questions, and have more to do with "discrimination" (which includes much more than race) than they do race itself, and I've gone on too long, but let me just end by saying that if you think historically there was anything remotely like these modern issues of 'asians are good at math' or 'blacks are criminals' you are dead wrong. Historically, those statements are really weird to say. Charitably, you can maybe say that these issues are common to the last ~2 centuries of history, as transportation technologies accelerated migration trends, but you really can't say more than that.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
4d ago
I also think having an upvote/downvote system on what's supposed to be a neutral discussion forum is just completely idiotic. Everyone just uses it as an "I agree" button for upvotes and "I disagree" for downvotes. This functionally means any left-leaning or even just contra-MAGA opinion gets heavily downvoted. I've had plenty of people then use this as an excuse to claim the equivalent of "uhhh, can't you see you're getting a lot of downvotes!?! Have you ever stopped to consider that maybe this is because you're wrong and stupid!?!?!?!?" Pure heat, negligible light.
However, you can actually block yourself from seeing the score if you use Ublock Origin and add the following to your filter list:
www.themotte.org##button.m-0.p-0.nobackground.caction.btn
I consider this 100% essential if you want to use this site and ever substantially disagree with MAGA talking points.
hydroacetylene
4d ago
Take Europeans to Buccees. Everything is bigger in Texas, indeed...
hydroacetylene
4d ago
He has no way of knowing that.
hydroacetylene
4d ago
It's actually even a bit brighter than you think- red tribe whites are on track to have the highest TFR of any major group in the next year or two(currently tied with hispanics, blacks are a distant third) and that looks to be durable.
No doubt many motteizeans would prefer yankees to be the durable demographic core. But hispanics are reliant on immigration to keep their demographic growth; that will inevitably slow from declining populations in Latin America.
I agree with you that the better parts of Mexico, Brazil, etc are extremely recognizable as a worst case scenario for America and are broadly 'fine' in global terms.
Gaashk
4d ago
Third rate universities have programs like lumberjacking, which do require manual labor. My father got an English degree from a third rate university, then went on to become a cook for the next decade, like his father. He worked on the campus grounds crew, and pointed out various dumpsters when I visited. Then he went on to teach high school when the kitchen became too Spanish heavy and they stopped paying for cooling or letting them take breaks because the illegals would put up with that crap.
It's pretty permeable.
hydroacetylene
4d ago
The very poor in America do not eat meat. They're not eating rice and beans either, mind- it's a diet of ultra-processed food, made of vegetable oil, additives, sugar, and white flour combined in various forms.
doing homeschooling successfully would be much easier than it actually is, and it would be much more common
If the parent's smart enough to educate their kid correctly with homeschool, and the kid inherited enough of that intelligence to get the benefits of having an intelligent teacher, the parent is also more likely to understand the opportunity cost of leaving their 6-figure job to do it and that private school and tutors aren't that expensive (and you can fire them if they do it badly).
So it makes sense that most homeschoolers are going to be average parents (or maybe slightly below average if they're doing it for religious reasons), teaching average children, and getting average results.
hydroacetylene
4d ago
Prediction- the GOP retains and increases its dominance at the national level due to a confluence of factors, some structural-constitutional and some by being blessed with insane enemies. Their performance in government is consistently lackluster; the solution to the exploding debt continues to be inflation and lying, the ideologues migrate to state level politics and the national US government becomes increasingly corrupt due to one party dominance. The long term trend in by-group TFR continues where the red tribe takes, and holds long term, status as the highest-TFR major group. US population peaks in the 2040's, and social security's decline in real dollar amounts becomes unfixable. This leads to a real estate price decline as seniors tap into their sources of wealth.
The labor market remains strong for blue collar workers but experiences ups and downs, and slow wage growth, for white collar workers. The population concentrates in a relatively smaller number of cities; for status seekers, this timeline sucks. For second tier cities, it's awesome.
Jiro
4d ago
The worst case scenario here would be that Epstein makes public statements accusing everyone from Bill Clinton to Donald Trump to The Man in the Moon of bangin underage girls on his private island. But as I mentioned earlier, there would be no motive for him to do so at that point other than spite.
Being harmed by revelations isn't an all or nothing thing. Fingering well-connected people probably would have some effect, even though since they are well-connected they won't be harmed as much as people who aren't well connected.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4d ago
Assuming Trump doesn't run for president, he could still run for something else, Welcome to Moosewood style, and then lose.
aqouta
4d ago
What we ought to have is an app where everyone ranks the field from day 1 of the campaign and can change at any point. Then we could get real time feedback on messaging. Of course the end problem is even if you were made godking of the docratic party you still have to implement a system like this where 95 year olds who can't handle technology more complicated than a television remote or deal wit the disengenuous claim that poor black people don't have cell phones.
hydroacetylene
4d ago
This is because when democrats can articulate positive visions they're hyper-unpopular('defund the police' 'protect trans kids'). Trump, for all his faults, is very good at articulating ideas that are popular, even if they're bad('no tax on overtime').
hydroacetylene
4d ago
Joe Biden is the only one to beat Donald Trump in an election (there’s a good chance he retains that honor forever)
? Trump's not running again. It's impossible for someone else to beat him in an election.
There is very little in the way of actual policy outcomes that is easily traced to Biden’s senescence.
Biden was, and is, personally a moderate strongly aligned with the black political machine and not on the best terms with the progressive wing of the party. That is, uh, not how he governed.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
4d ago
Death. With no immortality of any sort, athiesm promises an end to delusion and suffering.
aqouta
4d ago
He was a populist promising improbably handouts to the kinds of people who dominated the social media sites when he was running. Really not surprising he appeared popular.
Gaashk
4d ago
I wasn't enjoying the comments about women all that much either, but shrug, people here are interesting. They often say interesting things. I can just not read the threads that are mostly complaining about large groups of people.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
4d ago
When the working class get turfed out of their working-class jobs, they don't smoothly transition into managerial or knowledge-economy jobs. Their communities died and once independent and hard-working people all slid into the welfare-and-fentanyl pit of despair.
Once more confirmation you people think whites are an inferior race incapable of competing with Guatemalans. I have a much more positive view of white people.
There is no feasible way for the entire working class to move up into the managerial class for all the immigrants you seem to think are more suitable for these jobs. They are the losers of a world of open borders. They're not economic deadweight, they're your countrymen, for God's sake!
They don't exist, as the unemployment rate confirms.
The WSJ has a new article (archive link) out detailing a certain incident where Trump was composing fanfic of himself and Jeffrey Epstein bonding over their shared secret interest in the same kinds of women, and then signing his name to it. This was sent as a gift for Epstein's 50th birthday.
I personally don't think it's that bad, but I've been heavily radicalized against conspiracy theories over the past few years. I highly doubt Epstein was blackmailing huge swathes of wealthy/influential people with pedophilia. However, if I was given towards conspiratorial thinking this probably wouldn't be a great look for Trump.
EDIT: Trump has responded, and he's furious. It appears he desperately tried to have Rupert Murdoch crush the story, but that Murdoch apparently wasn't able to do so. Now he's promising to sue. Also, Hillary.
It also looks like he might cave and actually publicize it? I don't know if the grand jury stuff is all that people are interested in or what:
More options
Context Copy link