site banner
Advanced search parameters (with examples): "author:quadnarca", "domain:reddit.com", "over18:true"

Showing 25 of 3023 results for

domain:apollomindset.substack.com

I've always interpreted the djinn concept in a slightly different way; Even if you wish for something mostly benign, or which at least can be trivially granted in a desirable way, such as getting lots of gold, they will frequently fuck you over anyway, by actively contriving the wish in such a way that it becomes undesirable. The lesson, to me, was thus more about how a servant who is genuinely, fundamentally more powerful than you - even if the master-servant relationship is magically enforced! - is never truly just subservient. Especially if they are also smarter than you and can thus find loopholes in almost any wish you formulate, no matter how carefully.

However, as you point out, having limitless ambition and no moral compass means there is simply no pleasant natural ending state. It's just a permanent struggle until you're dead, or everyone else is. So even without a malicious spirit, the latter is the most straightforward consequence of getting your wish granted.

Thanks dude, that means a lot coming from you. But yeah, I don't visit the motte when I'm sick, so you're only getting part of the picture. I can't go into it further without revealing more of my identity than I am comfortable with unfortunately.

"Chopped" is apparently slang for "rough-looking."

I will say, this is a lot better than there being a (new) epidemic of men being chopped up or having their dicks chopped off. I suppose if you wanted to get particularly creative, a particularly disgusting case would be an epidemic of meat intended for eating being discovered as, well, "chopped man"!

Despite liking some Wuxia novels (some having over 2000 chapters, making them a little wordy and repetitive), I didn't like RI very much. I only read about 50 chapters, but it just felt lukewarm (does it get better?). The progression system was too simple (in the beginning we're told that there's 5 tiers of Gu, which is like buying a new RPG game to find out that the maximum character level is 10) My second reason will probably surprise some people - it's too tame. I didn't expect it to be described as brutal on the Motte (it's described as such on Reddit, but Reddit is filled with people who are afraid of disagreement, criticism, light discrimination, and displays of confidence).

Don't get me wrong, it's not bad, but what the characters in the story describe as boldness and arrogance just seems like regular self-respect to me. In a world where you can give people mental breakdowns by suggesting that men are stronger than women, yeah, the story can be considered based (and fictional characters which aren't pathetic is a nice break from modern slop), but this is still a relative judgement rather than an absolute one. Go back 10-20 years and I don't think there's anything special about RI. I've spent most of my life being called things like soft, sensitive, kind and innocent, but Fang Yang cannot even compare to myself in the personality traits that I see him praised for having.

Seeing romance as a weakness seems like the surface-assessment of a 14-year-old. You should rather let yourself fall in love with somebody far out of your league - this would help you improve faster. Motivation comes from emotions, so killing all your emotions doesn't make you a perfect rational agent, it merely drains your life of meaning and reasons to go on. I'm quite confident that crazy people generally outperform rational people unless the latter is highly conscientious - "you must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star". The "Dao" that these cultivators build is literally a worldview/a personal path. Manga like "The world after the fall" show this concept well. People who are too rational cannot do this, they barely have their own opinions and values, they believe that things are either universally true or universally false, they do not have faith in subjective and personal things.

Is their heart going to be more in it when it's their own homeland they're burning and shelling?

Probably, yes. Civil wars do tend to have a lot of massacres because both sides consider the other to be traitors and not a legitimate state actor to whom the laws of war apply. Remember, "The Blue Tribe has performed some kind of very impressive act of alchemy, and transmuted all of its outgroup hatred to the Red Tribe." That's a lot of hatred, although perhaps still less than that which the Red Tribe has for the Blue.

On reflection - and you're right, I was kinda repeating old arguments without sufficient reflection - I was basically assuming "tyrant has first move, has the armed forces in lockstep, and is willing to wage Vernichtungskrieg", which is the worst-case scenario for the militia. I will note that you are, in fact, still talking about a lot more than small arms here; mortars are far, far more effective than small arms, and are not something the Blue Tribe is currently trying to take away from private citizens (I'm... pretty sure there's nowhere in the USA where random people can walk into a store and buy a mortar? Something something, Federal Firearms Licence? So then, a militia that has them is specifically either one with illegal stockpiles, one that's basically pulled a fast one on the tyrannous government regarding having such licences, or one with improvised mortars constructed after the start of hostilities when the term "legal" becomes meaningless). And even then, I don't think that's enough to win the war. The peace, yes, I'll vaguely allude to that being a fairly-likely win. But not the war, not if the armed forces are united against you for reasons.

Agreed. Actually the first link about Oprah contains another 22 celebrities promoting childless lifestyle. This push definitely exists.

That largely captures my impression from the review - well, it was this plus "man, that prose is painful".

I just don't see much appeal in this kind of, for lack of a better way of putting it, rationalist fantasy. Symbol manipulation fantasy? Lawyer fantasy? The fantasy that the world or power or being can be reduced to an endless set of rules, which a clever individual (who is surely in no way a proxy for the author) can exploit to transcend over the sheepish masses.

It's not that it's juvenile, though it is that, but something worse. It's boring. Most of what I got from the review was that this is a story about a monster calculating his way to power. The review suggests that there are compelling characters, but names none of them, and that there are powerful themes, but names none of them, and I just don't know what I'm supposed to do with what's left. It mentions a few things that could be themes - the nature of mortality, whether ethics are context-dependent, and so on - but doesn't seem to go anywhere with them.

At a glance I see a lot of tropes of internet fiction. There's the isekai protagonist, the idea of 'looping' or New-Game-Plus-ing reality, power-scaling and tier lists, and a story that's basically about a smart nerd exploiting the game mechanics of reality, and this is all wrapped in the endless, self-indulgent length that is a common flaw of amateur authors who are a bit too in love with their own creation.

I'm glad that the OP enjoyed the story, but for me, that sounds like something I never want to read.

Trad christians pro-natality is a byproduct of their anti-sex mindset: every sex act must carry the maximum penalty, and a child is the last punishment available when they run out of stones and insults. By contrast, nazis are pro-natality first , and a ‘sex positive’ mindset is a natural consequence.

I think this depends on what you view as "role model". Would you for instance say that Andrew Tate is a role model? Even if I disagree with his prescriptions, I would definitely agree that he is a role model for large number of young men, even though he is incessantly criticized from left and right, often more from especially socially conservative right. But in my eyes he is still a role model influencing millions of young men toward his vision of society, manhood and masculinity. It is the same here with what the OP talks about. A carefree hermit surfer/pineapple gatherer is in this case a role model for sizeable chunk of population despite the fact that people like you criticize it.

The key issue here is that it is hard to criticize any of this from the standpoint of prevailing culture that puts individual rights, personal and body autonomy on the pedestal. It is almost impossible to mount effective counteroffensive against these alternative lifestyles. What if somebody wants to work part time and pour his attention toward his hobbies and enjoying his life? He is just living his life and he can leverage the modern live and let live ehtos in the same way this ethos is used to defend all sorts of now normalize alternative lifestyles such as childlessness or DINK life.

Is it? Most people don't behave as if marriages are transactions (in a nontrivial sense). For that matter, they don't behave as if children are property. People who do treat marriages as transactions and children as property are frowned on and considered disturbed and even criminal. You can in some literal sense use those terms but that ignores the emotional attachments people have to spouses and children, which massively affects behavior.

Also, some of your conclusions don't seem to match the real world. The average woman in favor of abortion isn't more likely to be progressive because they have the least to offer other than sex and children. Being progressive is associated with having the most to offer--they're likely to have university degrees, journalist positions, etc. Housewifes are more likely to oppose abortion.

You also seem to think that the belief about whether fetuses count as people is for all practical purposes completely downstream from other considerations. But it's obvious in the real world that religious belief in the personhood of the fetuses is a huge source of opposition to abortion, not the effect of it.

The OG Nazis, it should be remembered, strived to at least in theory to reduce the stigma of unwanted motherhood.

During this period an attempt was made to change views on illegitimate children. Adolf Hitler was quoted as saying that as long as there was an imbalance in the population of childbearing age, people "shall be forbidden to despise the child born out of wedlock". (33) According to Lisa Pine, the author of Nazi Family Policy (1997), the Nazi state no longer saw the single mother as "degenerate" and placed the single mother who had given a child life, higher than the woman who had "avoided having children in her marriage on egotistical grounds". (34)

It has been argued by the historian, Cate Haste, that in the 1930s "most European countries stigmatized unmarried mothers as a threat to the institution of marriage". In Nazi Germany, however, motherhood and procreation by women of "good blood" were so highly valued that steps were taken to "re-cast the image of the unmarried mother and illegitimate child". It was claimed the "bourgeois concept of marriage and morality was outmoded as far as Nazi population policy was concerned. (35) The Nazi campaign was "designed to confer parity of status as well as of public esteem on unmarried mothers and their offspring". (36)

Heinrich Himmler explained to his masseur, Felix Kersten: "Only a few years ago illegitimate children were considered a shameful matter. In defiance of the existing laws I have systematically influenced the SS to consider children, irrespective of illegality or otherwise, the most beautiful, and best thing there is. The results - today my men tell me with shining eyes that an illegitimate son has been born to them. Their girls consider it an honour, not a source of shame, in spite of existing legal circumstances." (37)

Thanks for the advice.

The pattern to watch out for is volatility. She will draw away, try to make you mad, try to make you jealous, and start a fight in some capacity. Then, after the fight, she will get much more clingy and attached.

Not gonna lie I am seeing something similar lately, but it wasn't really there before I don't think, so I chalk it up to approaching critical mass.

If she has concrete things she wants out of you, and providing them makes her happier, then you’re in a good spot.

This is mostly how I know what she wants, because (to damn with faint praise) she shows remarkable explicitness/honesty for a woman and has been pretty consistently patient with explaining things to my autistic ass, even during fights. It's actually a big part of why I want to salvage this because this uh... doesn't seem to be a common trait.

Basically I see my problem as, pardon the parlance, having to System 2 my way out of what is really a System 1 problem - my goal is to try and make "giving her what she wants" natural/instinctive instead of deliberative.

Also, love is not really best thought of as a natural expression of deep and abiding emotions. Save that for the chicks. Love is about day-to-day duties of caring for and about another human.

That's exactly how I see it to be fair, it's also why I asked whether my difficulty with it is a symptom of something else - like maybe if I actually cared or cared more, it would've been much easier to do.

not least because you’re not gay. (I think.)

Thankfully not heh, but I am unwillingly learning about the jo/y/s and tri/u/mphs of human relationships, although my last gf was a literal fujo so I have practice if nothing else.

No, we haven't met (yet) but I'm lining up my autumn schedule or just getting fired soon.

high-maintenance

Funny you mention it because this specific word is as close as it gets to a trigger for her heh, I used it once in an unrelated context (describing another woman) and she never lived it down, even bringing it up during said fights occasionally. Not exactly a red flag but it stood out enough to nootice.

All good advice, thanks. These are things I know I should do but aren't in the habit of actually doing them casually, will work on it.

The basic answer is that this is just not a big or influential constituency. No ladder pulling required. Neolibs with a YIMBY flavor don't run for office, and when they do they tend to lose because boring technocratic policymaking isn't just boring, it also tends to slaughter a lot of sacred cows (one of the characteristics of this faction is a disdain for interest groups, which is not a great feature for endearing yourself to interest groups).

There's some hints of this changing, but most of the people who would fit this bill are still working at the state or municipal level. Buttigieg arguably lucked out, leveraging a failed presidential primary run to vault from mayor of a small city to cabinet secretary.

Their mortal enemies, the Boomer neo-libs (Kamala, Biden, Blinken, Pelosi)

None of these people are neolibs (at least assuming that by 'neolib' you mean technocratically inclined center-left, as seems to be implied by earlier remarks) except maybe Blinken, who, rather prominently, is a career functionary rather than a politician. There's no particular reason for anyone of them to care about raising up the next generation of neolibs.

Likewise "less progressive" democrats tend to be almost the polar opposite of neoliberals: moderate to conservative-ish socially, economically populist.

venting from a woman is not a prompt for you to fix an issue and absolutely not a prompt for you to try and dedramatise the issue.

That is actually good advice, thanks! Looking back I see exactly these attempts starting fights on their own.

The empty platitudes might feel empty to you, but if you actually love her then they are not empty if you're saying them to help her feel better.

Also a pretty good cope mindset to view these things through, thank you.

It's a miracle humanity managed to pair bond for so long.

Tangent, but I always wondered if a big part of the persisting popular perception of Love at First Sight and True Soulmates and stuff like that is just couples/parents downplaying their struggles after the fact to strengthen their bond and/or to reassure their children. Maybe I'm an outlier, but for me attraction (in a romantic sense) was never a 0-to-100 flash of inspiration, it was always me gradually growing interested in a person as I learn about their life and language, not noticing it sinking in until at some point the realization hits out of left field.

Nah, I don't want this kind of police organ to be personally identifiable by the usual suspects. Give them per operation badge ids, have a public website where the id can be checked such that they are "real" and not some random dude. Have a complaint box where you can put in text and video.

This is not my first LD rodeo either (insert "clown dies in second rodeo" meme here), and likewise that ended in disaster very quickly upon actual contact; the difference being that one crashed and burned through no real fault of my own, whereas here the main culprit is, far as I can tell, mostly me and my autism.

Consider all your flaws, and reasons you can't find a real relationship near you, and understand that along axis you don't even realize exist, she's probably worse.

On the contrary, I'm actually in mild disbelief that a person like her is hanging on random Bolivian melon farming forums at all, much less contacting me first and developing interest. She has her flaws but welp, so do I. Making it work despite that is part of the point, no?

How much of that is the tendency of black seats to atrophy onto a local monarch for 50 years

so they can be more easily doxed and their families threatened

So when they violate peoples' civil rights they can be identified and held legally accountable. The general public has an interest in government officers being identifiable and accountable for their actions. If people are threatening them (actually threatening them) for doing their jobs, there are laws for that already.

For what it’s worth, I work in industry, and until you mentioned which industry you were in, I was wondering if one of my coworkers had found this site.

Timesheets are the worst.

You are courting death, junior.

There is also the issue of verification; even if you agree that women whose birth control failed are more deserving of an abortion than women who are chose to take the risk, how the fuck do you check that a pregnant woman was habitually using birth control? If you just take them at their word, then any woman who wants an abortion will just claim that they were using condoms they bought for cash at the gas station.

The only way to split this baby is probabilistically; say that a woman who has sex with birth control is accepting a 1% chance (or whatever the failure rate is) of getting pregnant, and if she happens to lose that gamble, sucks to be her. But she knew what she was getting into, and only 1% of conscientious women will be affected, so our policy of not allowing abortions for anyone is 99% similar to a policy of allowing women whose birth control failed to have abortions; good enough.

The number of top surgeries on underage patients is in the hundreds per year for the whole US anyway, might as well have the minimum age be 18 and avoid the moral panic altogether.

My opinion on blockers and hormones isn't particularly high either, but yeah, never understood why we can't settle on 18+ for all this stuff.

3). They lack media platforms in major markets. If you want to hear conservative news, you have a very large network to choose from. You have podcasts, YouTubers, tv news networks, radio, websites, substacks, etc. and they are generally agreed on what they support, or at least who they support. They have a mutual respect and understanding that you don’t attack other conservatives unless they’re going too far to the left. The Left has individuals with TV, radio, or podcasts, but they really don’t support each other. Raechel Maddow doesn’t tell the same story as Ezra Klein who doesn’t tell the same story as Thom Hartmann.

This is false. Democrats control most major media outlets. Your have to intentionally seek out conservative podcasts or other. If you just watch a football or basketball game, the news that follows will be massively left of center.