domain:betonit.substack.com
Pasha
Defend Kebab
4m ago
Similar topic, I still have absolutely no clue what all the rust drama of some time ago was about. It’s just endless word salad and nobody says openly what the hell is it that they are upset about. It reminds me of when girl factions in the middle school would have public fights overs Facebook and none of the boys would have absolutely no clue what was being fought over
Boarchariot
6m ago
I went to Montessori school, and then a regular local public school. I don't know if it was that the Montessori style complemented my natural inclinations or formed some of them, but I was always an independent student. Also weird in a variety of ways, and I think my parents gave up on curbing my eccentricities pretty early (and my teachers were all very accepting). I would have been miserable or rebellious if that wasn't the case, I'm sure. But in terms of school and learning I was always interested and curious, and naturally did well (which is what every parent hopes for, but is entirely unhelpful as advice).
I went to the local grade school by foot every day, and came home for lunch for most of my early school years. It felt like school was just an extension of my backyard. That changed in middle school, which was reached by bus. The only extracaricular activity I was ever part of was band in middle school, and the teacher was great. Most of the teachers I had were good, and a handful were very formatice and memorable. My parents did not push any interests on me and supported my interests when they arose.
My mom went to the local high school as a kid and hated it, and it was known for being even rougher by the time I was set to go. I applied to a few different special programs in the area and ended up going to an arts program a bit further away. The extra expenses (bus transport and material fees) were paid by my parents.
It was a regular local high school for some people, and you could see the difference in investment between students who chose to be there versus the students who were local. The teachers were exceptional, but I think students wanting to be there made their jobs easy. I'm confident that I was much happier going to that school than I would have been at the local school. As you can imagine the music, theatre and art kids in highschool were a pretty open minded crowd. I never felt weird or ostracized, and I was able to focus on learning and making friends. The horror stories from other high schools (fights, bullying, drugs) weren't really an issue at mine.
yofuckreddit
8m ago
One of the cringiest faux pas of my lifetime was rating every single female classmate in my 7th grade yearbook. Which was then found and passed around.
There was something deeply distasteful about a mid bro such as myself a) exhibiting how thirsty I was for some of my female friends b) quantitatively showing how unattractive I found others. Even for children this was a bit of a bridge too far, I didn't recover socially from it until 9th grade.
Since then I've migrated to a more progressive, binary system in which women are either a 1 or a 0. There's not as much fidelity but it leads to richer conversations about attractiveness anyway.
It is funny, though, how when it comes to ranking attractiveness women are so vicious and unrealistic compared to men.
I also have a far less charitable reading of "unrapeable" than OP - I think it's obvious that it means someone is too ugly to rape. This is still just dumb kids getting together to say stupid and hateful shit because they have underdeveloped EQ. This has been happening since forever, and it's not a sign of some endemic issue in Australian society. Fuck Marry Kill is a classic game.
2rafa
10m ago
Consider the 30 year old single mother on a dating app looking for a real man to support her - Judeo-Christian values would say something like 'man up, we're all equal in God, love your neighbour's children as yourself' whereas traditional values would probably scold you for being on Tinder in the first place and exclude the woman from polite society
Traditional morality has no prohibition on marrying a single mother, and indeed encourages it. Mohammed himself (at least according to the Sunnis) married first a woman who had had children by two previous husbands, and married several other widows with many children between them. Remarriage was historically much more common because of widowhood; it's likely that fewer men have a wife with prior children today than at any previous time in history.
Even if we say that the single mother was not widowed and merely divorced, Muhammad and ancient Christians and Jews also married divorced women, and again this was religiously satisfactory in most cases and (in Islam especially) considered an auspicious act for one's chances in the afterlife. Indeed in Judaism, the only man who must marry a virgin is the singular High Priest, and even then only if he marries once in office, rather than before it.
Even if we go one step further and say that our single mother is neither widow nor divorcee but actual whore in the biblical sense, it is unclear how bad this is. Prostitutes being forgiven, even exalted, feature heavily in the New Testament and the Quran and Hadiths. Except for the prohibition for Kohanim, and a line in the Quran about how a 'fornicator' must marry a 'fornicatress' (which if anything is a limit on male promiscuity, but is widely interpreted by scholars as not applying literally for some reason). The only additional Christian prohibition I'm aware of is that if she was married and was divorced for something that was not adultery, she would not be able to remarry.
If you define conservatism as Judeo-Christian values, mass migration, globalization, regime change abroad and so on... then sure, US Jews, British Jews are conservative. George Soros is nearly a conservative, albeit insufficiently supportive of police and dangerously opposed to Israel. If you define conservatism differently, conserving national identity and demographics, conserving national industries, conserving traditional values... then they're absolutely not conservative.
Possibly, but then only a very small percentage of even the native population would be considered 'conservative'. Since there are only two major parties in FPTP systems, the only information we have is about whether some population tends to vote for the more or less leftist one.
RaiderOfALostTusken
10m ago
I would say I did. I went to public school in Canada in what was considered the sort of "mid-upper class" suburb outside of a more major city. High school had a population of about 400 people, can't really remember what the size of Jr High or Elementary was. I would say that I got along with all of my teachers - there was one teacher who wore her politics on her sleeve and I do remember butting heads against her quite a bit, but there was another one who was a very vocal avowed feminist type but was also really really good, very fond memories. I guess she always kind of had a self deprecating vibe about the whole thing which made it kind of fun.
I would not consider myself as a "popular" kid, but I was definitely "well liked", I could generally be friendly and interact with most if not all of the various cliques without trouble. I do not think that I was ever bullied - despite being by far the shortest person of my age category, I was able to lean into it and have enough confidence that if that was happening, I just didn't register it.
My parents were deeply involved in my schooling, the expectation was 80% minimum grades. If my grades started to slip then it was discussion about what we could do, did I need a tutor? one on one time with the teacher? did I need to remove any extracurriculars? I don't think I would have had the grades I did if they weren't as involved. I also had the opportunity to be in various musical theater productions, including playing the lead in a school musical which played at the local town 500 seat theater, which was a treasured experience I'm glad I got to have.
I think there's an interesting "The Dress" style divide in how this statement is perceived that's basically determined by your belief about whether these boys would rape someone [if they could get away with it]. There's probably a genuine divide between a large number of men who wouldn't and can't conceive that the median man would, and a large number of men who would and can't conceive that the median man sincerely wouldn't, and they are prevented from sizing up each other in part by the circumstance that signalling needs create large sets of those who are in one group but claim to be in the other.
Depending on whether you are a believer that rape is widely accepted (and here the belief about others really seems to matter more than whether you would do it yourself), "unrapeable" sounds either like "I wouldn't take this one for free" (but I would take the others for free - free stuff is good!) or "this wouldn't get stolen if it were left out" (it's not like I'm a thief, but it's so bad that it's beneath even outgroup bad people like thieves).
(I tried and failed to find a realistic instance of something like "the dogs wouldn't eat you if you were thrown to them" being used as an insult, so I have to settle for the weaker point that a hypothetical insult of that type would not be taken as an endorsement of cannibalism.)
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
26m ago
What exactly am I supposed to glean from the rare cases of non-religious Jewish journalists investing Haredi? When I know that billionaire Thomas Kaplan, the billionaire Guma Aguiar, the billionaire Kushners, the billionaire Lev Leviev, the billionaire Ron Perelman, the billionaire Tevfik Arif, the billionaire Israel Englander, and even the Ukrainian former billionaire Kolomoisky, are all either funding ultra orthodox schools and organizations, or have funded them in the past? You wrote “it’s often secular Jews at the forefront of anti-Haredi policies” — no, they are at the forefront of funding them. And a journalistic website is not a “policy”. You are showing me a puddle in the concrete and telling me that it’s the forefront of water in the area, while I look behind you and there’s an expansive ocean with waves crashing against the pier.
Did you mean to write, “some Jews write about things against the ultra orthodox”? Well, sure. You’ve missed the best ones though, like the guy who writes the FailedMessiah blog, or the writer who wrote “Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America”. But these guys don’t matter when they are a puddle, and the ocean = secular Jewish billions and literal Mossad.
The aggressive pursuit now is arguably because the largely progressive Jewish donors who funded Bragg's DA campaign care about it a great deal
If you have a source I would be interested in reading it. When NYT “aggressively” wrote a front page piece on ultra orthodox corruption in schools (which was honestly great journalism), nothing actually came from it.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
41m ago
I think your last paragraph gets to the heart of the matter. Attractiveness is tied very tightly to status, particularly for women. When men are ranking women's attractiveness, their rankings are pretty close to openly articulating the status rankings of the women in question - ranking someone last in a group is basically the same thing as just outright saying, "I think she's a loser and not worthy of the same respect as the other women". When this is done with people are members of a near-group (or worse still, a friend-group), it's a fairly aggressive action to take. On the flip side, this is why ranking celebrities can be fun even in a mixed-gender group - no one has to be personally invested in it in the same way. Of course, everyone basically knows where they stand anyway, but it's rude to say it outright! If you had a group of guys where one buddy was unathletic and low-income, everyone in the room would know he's low status, but it's still a dick move to explicitly point it out.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
43m ago
She's left in the past and come back. Hopefully she comes back again, she is someone I really enjoy hearing from.
SSCReader
47m ago
Employers will only hire humanities graduates if they are sufficiently clued in to know which are the intellectually rigorous schools and programmes.
Again this may be true for very high end employers but for most all they look for is a degree and they don't care how rigorous that degree was. I did recruitment for both private and government organizations, and while the civil service did care, no-one else did, including blue chip communications companies and local government. And the reason for that is they are not getting to pick from Oxford or Cambridge or Harvard grads or wherever in the first place. Your middle of the road office manager type can easily get a job with a non-intellectually rigorous humanities degree. Sure they might not get into Wall Street or quant jobs, but they were never going to. Your point only applies for the very top slice of jobs, for all the others, just need to have a degree to tick a box on the form, you will be fine with a degree in basket weaving or creative writing or musicology.
Armin
51m ago
If the major objective of a system is to protect the interests of the powerful people that lead the system, then it is logical to say that a feminist society exists to protect the interests of women, and that means protecting them from one of the worst sins, the attack against the faux-equalitarian women's morality system.
It is all longhouse, all way down.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
52m ago
Why is it in bad taste for men to rate women's attractiveness?
It has been my experience that if you show (straight) men a group of women (across anything from a IRL social situation to just a set of headshots), they can pretty reliably sort them quickly by their own metrics of attractiveness. The rankings probably won't be identical, and they could change with interaction, but I bet at any given point most men, even those not looking for partners, are at least aware of who they find the most attractive woman in any given room.
But it's also generally verboten to discuss the rankings themselves in mixed contexts, and even most of the time in male spaces. But I have occasionally been party to discussion of rankings of celebrities. I would be curious of (straight) women think similarly, but I have no real information to go on.
One part, about banning one person (JR), seemed to be a controversy over whether a defense contractor (Anduril) should be allowed to sponsor the project, with the losing faction being "NATO defense contractors are what prevent Russia from conquering Ukraine and the rest of the world", and the winning faction being "defense contractors kill people and are icky and we don't want their name near us" (various positions were put forth, but I can't come up with a coherent charitable interpretation)
The charitable steelman is that Anduril's products flirt increasingly closely with autonomous weapons, and the extent humans are in the loop (for autonomous weapons made by other people) has at best diffused responsibility regarding validity of target selection, and more practically put to a point where oversight and responsibility aren't enforceable. The... less charitable bit is that, like Palantir, the (surveillance) equipment and technology is also used by ICE and police, and a lot of Nix tech could be and/or could be driven to be very useful for that equipment and technology. The even less charitable one is that, while Palmer Luckey isn't as No Go politics-wise as Peter Thiel, it's known, in ways that kept people from supporting him.
And what really got my attention were the comments by people speaking in support of him that were "flagged by the community and temporarily hidden".
Yeah. On one hand, that's a Discourse (the forum software designed by CodingHorror's lead) default behavior, and one reason (among many) I'm glad that Zorba didn't base this forum off Discourse. On the other hand, the moderation team can override it, or allow successor threads, and didn't.
I still can't figure out what side of the culture war the people fleeing the project are on, and that's probably intentional.
Dunno. There's at least some text from big names in the github from the TotsNotBlueTriberJustUsingTheirAssumptions, and not much explicit red triber, but that doesn't exclude the porque no los dos.
2rafa
1hr ago
Short of the kind of extreme plastic surgery that exists only in movies, he can't leave the life. I'm not defending him, and in any case he directly wishes me harm, hates me, and is an asshole. But I think he's realized his only option in life (other than subsisting off the most menial labor jobs anyone can get and hoping his coworkers never recognize him) is this from now on. It's clear he has some kind of relationship with intelligence since he can somehow still travel and use bank accounts, I presume he's feeding them stuff about other people in his movement, possibly about violent threats or people he thinks may be capable of political violence. That's usually a trade-off these people take.
2rafa
1hr ago
Secular Jews may want some of the Haredim to become more secular, but by and large they are allied politically, culturally, and religiously with them, and do zero to combat their corruption. Meanwhile, Chabad houses are becoming the center of religious life for non-orthodox Jews in America.
Who do you think funds efforts like this (given an extensive write-up by a Jewish journalist for NPR), where non-Haredi Jewish journalists are hired to dig up stories on political and financial corruption, sexual abuse and so on in that community, founded by an ex-Haredi guy who hates them?
Moster says the stories on the Shtetl website aim to present what's often missing in the Haredi press: stories about contentious issues such as corruption, white-collar crime and sexual abuse. One recent Shtetl feature details how Haredi Jews took over a village in the Catskills by claiming it was the primary residence of Jews who spend most of their time living in Brooklyn. Another, written by Hakimi, describes a series of anonymous ads for a family court judicial candidate in one of the Haredi towns in the suburbs north of New York City.
I see how secular Jews (not just leftist or even progressive ones) talk about the ultra-orthodox. Many advocate Xinjiang-level re-education, completely unironically. They hate them, especially those that live near or alongside them. In New Jersey, the reality of state politics and the fact that the Democrats don't have a supermajority means that the ultra-orthodox can ally with the state GOP to stymie legislative measures against them.
Okay, so are you referring to the slumlords that have gotten away with corruption / discrimination so far? What helped them get away with it for so long?
NYC slumlords have always gotten away with it, the occasional lawsuit etc excepted, especially when it comes to simply having poor conditions rather than discriminating based on race. All these guys were sued dozens of times, pursued by the city. Again, that's true for all slumlords historically, including the many, many gentile ones. The aggressive pursuit now is arguably because the largely progressive Jewish donors who funded Bragg's DA campaign care about it a great deal.
That’s again not true. Their secular advocacy groups made it a national news story. There were statements made by every politician. Their politicians secured them more security grants.
The ADL lobbies harder about a swastika on an elite university campus than they do about dozens of attacks by black people on Jews in NYC. The biggest complaint is typically that they don't even, uh, 'name' the perpetrators, so to speak.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1hr ago
what exactly do they imagine is to be done about the supposed epidemic of women being targeted for violence by men? Is there really a generalized belief that the problem is insufficient scolding or insufficient laws targeting this variety of crime?
Their response, if you could get down to the heart of the matter, would be: the thought that everything is stuck like this forever, that nothing will ever change, is too much to bear. So we have to believe that more education and more feminism and more shaming will fix all the problems, for the sake of our own sanity.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
1hr ago
No. It implies that any girl rated higher on the list might receive consideration for rape by someone.
(But in reality, it's just used because "fuck" has lost all its sting, so "unfuckable" is no longer edgy enough)
TIRM
1hr ago
a defense contractor (Anduril)
Which is weird, because Anduril makes small drones that defensively destroy incoming attacking drones by flying into them. They make actual defensive drones. They don't make Predator or Reaper style drones that are full sized planed that "drone" people with missiles.
“HRV for Biofeedback” is an app for iOS that is very accurate as far as I can tell and uses the camera + flash on your smartphone to graph your heartbeat in real time. Note that it costs $5 and you have to stop and do a 1-minute scan, it’s not always-on.
I had tachycardia (sudden-onset very fast heartbeat) not long ago. My smartwatch didn’t detect it (too brief, too far out of expected range) but the app showed it perfectly. The response on the graph also showed heartbeat returning to normal exactly at the moment I felt it do so. It was also able to show things like skipped beats. Strongly recommend.
I thought about getting a Kardia but in practice the app was as much as I needed. Is this just for personal checking, or does your friend need the alert?
SlowBoy
1hr ago
If the boys had rated their classmates on a scale of one to ten, this would still be in poor taste imho
Why is it in bad taste for men to rate women's attractiveness?
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1hr ago
I would wager that the point of this story is to shame Australian men in such a way that they fear male camaraderie. The story creates a fearful negative association with male solidarity, as when men get together they often discuss women. If men in a Western country decided to form male-only groups, this poses a problem to feminism — which then poses a problem to globalism and progressivism. The act of men getting together to judge women would greatly reduce feminism, promiscuity, all sorts of things, which may be seen as problematic.
Anyway, if Australia wanted to tackle gender violence, they need to do something about their aboriginal problem, because they are “32x more likely to be hospitalized due to family violence”. Next they would want to study their Somalian population, and possibly reduce all migration from that country. After that, eliminating alcohol culture would be the best big step.
SlowBoy
1hr ago
Think better of what? Edgy offensive teenage jokes? Is this something you think society can or should stomp out?
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1hr ago
While I am sure that there is some antisemitism, I'm annoyed by this being the standard for whether people that are trespassing, camping illegally, detaining others illegally, and so on are worthy of condemnation. I really don't even care whether what the mostly peaceful protestors are on about, whether I agree with them just doesn't actually play into whether I want them to knock off the nonsense. If you're trying to camp in a park, cops should show up and inform you that you that you're not allowed to do that. If you insist on doing it anyway, they should arrest you and remove your stuff from the park. The idea that the basics of evenly enforced law are up to whether the scofflaws are antisemitic or not is absurd (and plainly anti-constitutional).
orthoxerox
I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink
1hr ago
Here's what I have read during my digital Lent. The list is shorter than I wanted, because around week 3 I had to jump in and spend my evenings saving one of my teams, which left me too tired and wired to enjoy reading.
- Where the Water Goes : Life and Death Along the Colorado River, by David Owen, +2, but the Colorado is my favorite river, so I am biased. The book traces the river from its source to its former delta, exploring the history of how its water has been used since the first settlers appeared in its basin. One recurring theme that is relevant to rationalism is that efficiency should never be the only goal: when you have X consumers (acres of farmland or suburban lots) consuming Y water each, if you simply teach/force them to consume Y/2 water, the number of consumers will double. You'll still have X*Y total consumption, but now your system has no slack: you used to be able to force your consumers to scale back their consumption temporarily, but now they use as little water as possible already.
- True Names, by later Vernor Vinge, +2. The news of his death defined my immediate reading list. I had already read the Zones of Thought books (I recommend A Deepness in the Sky) and Rainbows End a decade ago, so I decided to read the rest of his most popular books. True Names is a novella, so you can easily finish it in an evening. It's one of these sci-fi classics that are truly timeless, I didn't feel it was written in 1980 at all.
- The Peace War, by Vernor Vinge, 0. It starts a bit like a Philip K. Dick's novel, but it's mostly the setting. Then it becomes The Book of the Long Sun: sufficiently entertaining that you don't feel like you've wasted your time and want to see how the story ends, but not something that stands out. The biggest science-fiction concept is treated more like a magic spell, and the characters are cardboard-like. Lots of mystery boxes, some of which are opened by the narrator between the scenes.
- Across Realtime, by Vernor Vinge, 1. It's the sequel to the previous book, but a different one, The Book of the Short Sun to the Long predecessor: a smaller-scale and more personal story. Not very much so, Vinge loves thinking about planet-sized issues too much to write one. At one point I felt like I've read the same story beats somewhere before, and turns out I was right, it was actually Vinge's Children of the Sky.
- Creatures of Thought, the Age of Steam, +2. An ongoing series of blog posts that explores the history of steam power, from Newcomen's pump to, presumably, the phasing out of everything except power stations after the WWII. It's not the only one online. I remember reading a different one that went deeper into the steelmaking aspect of the industrial revolution as well (no link, sorry), but this is one more extensive and good. The author still hasn't convinced me that Isambard Kingdom Brunel is worthy of the attention he's usually given. The only thing I would want from this series is more maps. It's not a big hassle to switch to another tab and find where Featherstone-upon-Hawthing (pronounced "fisting") is, but it gets old quickly.
- Bits about Money. +2 I followed a link to the article about how credit card rewards work and ended up reading a dozen more. It's not super technical (at least to a person with 15 years of banking experience), but still full of insights. I laughed a bit at the recurring "they bought a bank" quips in the payments in Japan article. Is buying a bank for internal purposes so unusual in the US? It's completely normal for a large Russian company or more often a conglomerate to own a pocket bank to simplify the management of its finances.
- Materialized View. +1 A blog about data engineering written by an industry veteran. A good way to keep yourself up-to-date with the latest happenings in the data engineering world.
It's not random. It's a popular phrase being shifted.
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