domain:felipec.substack.com
aceventura
38m ago
This entire episode solidified in my mind that its the US that has much more leverage over Israel than the other way around. It also undermined the argument that Israel has control over US foreign policy.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
39m ago
I shared my latest post on the Slate Star Codex subreddit, and Scott showed up in the comments to complain about how I'd characterised him in the article. I dutifully apologised and rephrased the offending passage. In the list of things that made me feel ashamed of myself this year, this was in the top five.
My condolences. If that happened to me, I'd be driven to drink.
Kind of like a less overtly titillating Aella, and, in my view, far more physically attractive.
(Presumedly) white men really not beating the allegations!
(She is pretty, but I found this particular photo profoundly disturbing. To be fair, now that I actually opened it, it's AI generated on purpose)
Crowstep
1hr ago
That's not why Tina Brown is criticising him though, according to Wikipedia she did exactly the same thing. She had an affair with a married man 25 years her senior. Ironically if Bezos had married a younger woman Brown might not have written the blog post, because her readers could criticise her for hypocrisy.
This looks like class hatred to me. Lauren Sanchez looks tacky and low class, with her big fake tits and duck lips. Tina Brown can't criticise her for that, so instead she insists that her sneering is on behalf of womankind, for feminism.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1hr ago
Anyone else ever catch the eye of their heroes?
Yeah, by walking right up to them and asking them "hey, do you have a few minutes to talk about your writing/fencing/programming"? (Or sending them an email, anyways.)
By accomplishment? Hell no.
iprayiam3
1hr ago
Does he have to marry an old fat lady?
No he has to stay married to his wife and the mother of his children
iprayiam3
1hr ago
I don’t disagree with this and that the just so undermines credibility of the point. On the other hand, I do think Bezos deserves to be criticized whoever he marries. He started an affair and broke up two marriages with children.
I think part of the issue is that modernity has removed the vocabulary to cricicize the object level misbehavior so they displace their ‘something is wrong’ to a secondary element
I'm very chuffed, but I find myself chagrined by the fact that the number of people I know IRL I can boast about this to round up to zero.
I know the feeling all too well.
- My latest post was restacked by this woman who applies data science principles to online dating. Kind of like a less overtly titillating Aella, and, in my view, far more physically attractive. I was flattered.
- It was also restacked by Sarah Haider, whose name I vaguely recalled seeing previously and who has her own Wikipedia page, which is cool.
- "Contra deBoer on transgender issues" was shared by Helen Joyce, I think it was shared by Eliza Mondegreen in a paid subscriber-only links roundup (she definitely liked it), and also liked by TracingWoodgrains and Freya India.
- Freddie deBoer commenced one of his duh-of-course-I-support-trans-rights articles by quoting a comment I'd posted on one of his previous articles and ostentatiously announcing how "profoundly uncompelling" he found said comment, in a tone which to me strongly suggested he doth protest too much.
The only way I could be more pleased is if it caught Scott's eye
I shared my latest post on the Slate Star Codex subreddit, and Scott showed up in the comments to complain about how I'd characterised him in the article. I dutifully apologised and rephrased the offending passage. In the list of things that made me feel ashamed of myself this year, this was in the top five.
yofuckreddit
1hr ago
Prostitution is still considered low class enough it's not really an option for someone so public
This is a fun story, and I apologise for the coming less-fun response. From where I'm standing, this is the story of how you and your friends lied and abused the trust of others in order to get things you knew you weren't entitled to. Like, this is the glitzy high-class counterpart to stories of underclass black guys vaulting the ticket barriers in BART stations.
I'm not saying this just to be a miserable scold (though I probably am that) but because when people talk about rebuilding virtue in society and upholding social trust, this is totally incompatible with that. I know that you're an upstanding citizen in many ways and that you work for various nonprofits etc. as well but why are people of a lesser standing going to do the hard, thankless work of keeping up their end when they know that this kind of thing is going on behind their back? Hearing stories like this just makes people feel like suckers for holding to the rules and trying not to trouble others.
I am reminded of a quote from SSC:
On The Road seems to be a picture of a high-trust society. Drivers assume hitchhikers are trustworthy and will take them anywhere. Women assume men are trustworthy and will accept any promise. Employers assume workers are trustworthy and don’t bother with background checks. It’s pretty neat.
But On The Road is, most importantly, a picture of a high-trust society collapsing. And it’s collapsing precisely because the book’s protagonists are going around defecting against everyone they meet at a hundred ten miles an hour.
You're not that, most of the time, but it seems to me that this is a little bit of that. Especially when you’re intentionally putting staff in a difficult spot, where they may well be in for professional consequences, so that you can get what you want:
The fact that six random bozos were even able to get this close and that she briefly considered letting them in [...] meant that someone had loose lips and various heads would surely be rolling down the fairway the following morning.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
2hr ago
Funnily enough, I have a comment saying pretty much the same thing, but that was over a year back. We can only hope that Scott hasn't forgotten his estranged children over here. He's still got his account, though it's been inactive for a while, at the very least he's aware of our existence.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2hr ago
Why do repeats when the whole trail iirc from 20 years ago in boy scouts is around 12 miles?
Lizzardspawn
2hr ago
Nevertheless, there are no white poor performance countries and no black high performance countries.
Argentina?
Rosencrantz2
2hr ago
But the assertion "I dress up for myself" directly implies that dressing up would be equally enjoyable regardless of whether one has an audience or not.
I think this is overstated. 'Dressing for yourself' can surely include feeling good when dressed up in public. You are participating in status games, you are expressing yourself, and you are turning heads because you enjoy the feeling of power that it gives you or because you are free of the anxiety of being judged or shamed when you know you're looking your best and your flaws have been minimised. That's markedly different than enjoying turning heads specifically because you want to make men horny. This is the difference between someone who dresses skimpily and whose primary satisfaction from that is attention from men, and someone who is interested in fashion and experiments with things that are orthogonal to basic male attraction (and the latter is a large amount of what people talk about on, say, your average style podcast – they are not always discussing how to be sexier in veiled terms, though they sometimes are, a lot of the time they are discussing trends, novelty and details of a kind that I daresay most men are pretty oblivious to and that are more to do with status, social impression, coolness and craft than sexiness).
By way of analogy, if everyone who claimed to be eating food "just for the taste" incidentally happened to be consuming a varied, balanced, nutrient-rich diet and expressed no interest in consuming tasty food with little nutritional value - it would be reasonable to discount their claims that this was their real motivation. Likewise if every male person who claimed to be pursuing orgasm purely for its own sake incidentally happened to only engage in sex acts which were likely to result in procreation (i.e. unprotected vaginal intercourse with nubile fertile ovulating females) and expressed no interest in pleasurable sex acts with little likelihood of procreation resulting. Or moreover, the counterfactual world in which food only tastes good if it's rich in nutrients and tastes disgusting otherwise; or in which orgasms only feel good if they are likely to result in procreation, and feel uncomfortable or painful otherwise.
I think the analogy for this would be a woman dressing with effort even though she doesn't want sexual attention and might actually be annoyed by it. That's pretty easy to imagine isn't it?
I also think you need to tease out many gradations of possible meaning in the spectrum of dressing for yourself vs dressing for others. I would think the primary meaning is that your objective is to feel good in such contexts that others think you look good or have matched the occasion (a form of female success). This inner feeling is going to be distinct from dressing up instrumentally just because you want e.g. male attention. Now sure there is an extreme interpretation of doing something for yourself that means you would get the pleasant feeling even if no one else can notice. But I don't think that is particularly central natural language usage. If you do carpentry for yourself as a hobby, you might be disillusioned if you were never allowed to give your wooden creations to anyone or show them to anyone. Part of their value lies in the pride you're able to take in showing them. But a lot of it is also in the feeling of mastery you have when working with wood and being able to create the 'kind of thing' that others would value. I think it would still be fair in such a scenario to say you were pursuing carpentry for yourself.
I also think it would be okay for a man to say they were pursuing orgasm for its own sake even though they actually could just get that via porn. (There are different flavours of orgasm only achievable with others.)
As an aside, I think women actually do often dress up by themselves. This is experimentation and practice I guess, but I think they enjoy it loads, from girlhood on.
Crowstep
2hr ago
Anyone else ever catch the eye of their heroes?
I'm half-convinced that link 5 on this article by Scott is based on this comment by me. Admittedly, they are three months apart, but I'd like it to be true. It would also prove that Scott lurks here.
Crowstep
3hr ago
In practice, feminist journalists always want highly successful men to marry women like themselves.
Steve Sailer's first law of female journalism strikes again.
OliveTapenade
3hr ago
I asked a second question as well. To repeat:
Do you think the US should aim to disempower West Africans? What would that mean? Banning them from running for office? Banning them from voting?
Okay, I've processed that you think that West Africans are inherently destructive to national health. Sure. So, you say, you must not "let them have political power". Can you translate that for me into a practical programme? What do you think the US should do?
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
3hr ago
You would also need a butler to supervise the assistants - managing staff is a job in itself.
The difference being that, in your examples, the claimed reason for doing X really exists, and continues to exist even in the absence of the evolutionary "goal" to which it is directed. It's true that tasty food tastes good; it's true that orgasms feel good. Lots of tasty food is lacking in nutritional value, and lots of things can result in orgasm even though there is no chance of procreation resulting. People can and do consume tasty food just because it tastes good, paying no mind to the nutritional content thereof; people can and do pursue orgasm just because they feel good, paying no mind to whether or not reproduction ensues as a result.
But the assertion "I dress up for myself" directly implies that dressing up would be equally enjoyable regardless of whether one has an audience or not. But if dressing up only feels good if you have an audience, then the claimed reason for doing X is simply untrue. Unlike the obesity crisis and porn addiction, there is no widespread societal epidemic of people spending thousands on clothes and makeup just so they can sit at home "feeling good" in their fancy clothes and makeup (obviously being an aspiring camgirl or influencer doesn't count: a virtual audience is still an audience). The audience is a necessary component to the activity in question feeling good: ergo, the claims to be dressing up "for myself" are an obvious post hoc realisation to rebut accusations of narcissism or attention-seeking, in a memetic environment in which women explicitly admitting to putting stock in or deriving positive feelings from male attention is seen as déclassé.
By way of analogy, if everyone who claimed to be eating food "just for the taste" incidentally happened to be consuming a varied, balanced, nutrient-rich diet and expressed no interest in consuming tasty food with little nutritional value - it would be reasonable to discount their claims that this was their real motivation. Likewise if every male person who claimed to be pursuing orgasm purely for its own sake incidentally happened to only engage in sex acts which were likely to result in procreation (i.e. unprotected vaginal intercourse with nubile fertile ovulating females) and expressed no interest in pleasurable sex acts with little likelihood of procreation resulting. Or moreover, the counterfactual world in which food only tastes good if it's rich in nutrients and tastes disgusting otherwise; or in which orgasms only feel good if they are likely to result in procreation, and feel uncomfortable or painful otherwise.
RenOS
something is wrong
3hr ago
I'm pretty confident that if Bezos would have married a literal nubile twenty something, we would have feminist journalists write about how this proves that men are shallow. If he had married a lower class mexican wife, it would be decried as vaguely coercive and that this proves men enjoy power differentials. If he had married white trash, he would be ridiculed as going back to his roots. Hell, if he married a conventionally attractive, age-appropriate, low-agency woman with a conventional job, that would probably also be insinuated as some sort of tradwife, wanting the woman to go back to the kitchen situation.
As several people have pointed out, Sanchez is in many ways precisely the sort of high-agency go-getter that should be popular with feminists, but who in practice always seems to be hated instead. In practice, feminist journalists always want highly successful men to marry women like themselves.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
3hr ago
Her approach to philanthropy is almost exactly what you would expect of a coastal PMC chick who studies creative writing at Princeton and ends up working as a secretary while claiming she is writing a novel.
It isn't quite NPC - she is doing agentic stuff in terms of looking for promising new charities to donate to rather than putting her name on buildings at the usual suspects, but "blue tribe PMC NPC" is a better model than "inverse Jeff".
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
3hr ago
and maybe had a kid or two
Don't underestimate this one. Once you have children together, you are on the same team - theirs. Some women eventually manage to hate their ex-husband more than they love the children, but men who do are vanishingly rare. The relationship a man has with the mother of his children is nothing like the relationship he has with a woman he is non-reproductively fucking.
It was game over as soon as I watched Mulan.
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