domain:firsttoilthenthegrave.substack.com
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
10m 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
16m 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
18m 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
26m 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.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
31m ago
I'm being hyperbolic of course, because I was making a joke - it's a minor thing, but it actually physically hurts when you go from darkness to bright light. Like after taking off sunglasses or getting high beamed on the highway.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
38m ago
And very few of them are tempting to use in such ways. Those substances doctors have in fact used in harmful ways. The US just recently had a dustup about opioids.
I bear no responsibility for any that, but leaving that aside, there's an opioid epidemic. If there's a Magic Mushroom epidemic, it must be endemic to Burning Man.
It doesnt explain why no non-recreational drugs do the same.
That's dead wrong. There are all kinds of drugs that have ~nil recreational value, but which engender physiological or psychological dependence.
A non-exhaustive list would include SNRIs, clonidine, gabapentin and pregabalin, corticosteroids, laxatives, nasal decongestants.
These are all substances that the body, once accustomed to, complains quite loudly and painfully about letting go of.
Barfknuckle
42m ago
Male sexuality is a lot simpler than female sexuality. Jeff could have destroyed his marriage for a nubile twenty-something with naturally big assets, but he went for tawdry 'sexy' with the trout pout and plastic boobs (though once again, I have to salute her commitment to starving and exercising in order to keep a taut muscle tone). It's not much good to criticise women for being shallow in the dating market when the fruits of success are to dress like this and hook your own billionaire.
Dude has enough money to just grab a big-titty college girl off the street like "MMM THIS TEEN IS SUITABLE FOR BREEDING" and get away with it, but instead he marries an age-appropriate woman and he still has to get shit for it? The hell with that. So she works out and had her tits done, so what? Does he have to marry an old fat lady?
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
48m ago
There's an endless list of substances that, if used recklessly or without sufficient knowledge, lead to harm.
And very few of them are tempting to use in such ways. Those substances doctors have in fact used in harmful ways. The US just recently had a dustup about opioids.
That would entail a full lecture
It really shouldnt. Listing of the action mechanisms of those drugs is not an explanation - if thats all you would do, the high-level answer is "its just a coincidence". It doesnt explain why no non-recreational drugs do the same. If there is some receptor pathway that necessarily connects the curative and recreational parts, then what makes you think they are distinct?
Sure but they're the best of the lot (still no STEM Nobels though). It's not that easy to get to the US from West Africa.
I don't deny that whites who voted for this guy are fools but there is at least potential for good things amongst a broad, non-cherrypicked white population. Build up a power base of elite West Africans at your peril, see what happens if they get you to open the floodgates.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1hr ago
The US can clearly do fine with a modest number of West Africans dragging it down. But if you want first-world performance... If you want safe, efficient, orderly public transport... If you want a lower burden of progressive taxation and affirmative action... If you want crime at civilized, first world levels...
Then you need to address the problem at the root cause. If you let them have political power they'll cause all kinds of problems, they'll West Africanize the country to a lesser or greater extent based on their number, admixture and so on. Bloated and corrupt government is just one and not even the worst problem necessarily.
Consider a thought experiment - what if all the politicians and powerful officials in America had to be black? Give it 20 years for the effects to settle. What do you expect the outcome would be in terms of performance? Would it look more like a high performance country (Japan, Switzerland) or a low performance country like South Africa? Naturally the US has plenty of capable demographics to squander so the decline wouldn't be as severe as South Africa, whose murder rate is actually comparable to the death toll in the Russia-Ukraine war. Nevertheless, there are no white poor performance countries and no black high performance countries. Even on a city level one can observe that having politics dominated by blacks is not a recipe for good outcomes: Detroit.
Now consider the reverse. All the politicians and powerful officials in America have to be non-black. Give it 20 years. Would the outcome be better than the alternate? Is the US really losing much by banning them from office? All that would happen is some rioting, which can be quickly and easily put down with a little effort. West Africans are notoriously bad at fighting, disorganized and inaccurate marksmen. Of course it's a totally moot point since as bad as West Africans are at fighting, US whites are even less willing to force the issue.
Rosencrantz2
1hr ago
Okay so compare: 'Evolution gave us a brain that enjoys different flavours because it gives us the nutrients to survive." With: 'Anyone who claims they eat food 'just for the taste' is full of shit. They are really doing it to get a proper range of nutrients.'
Or: 'Evolution gave us a brain that feels good during orgasm because it leads to reproduction." With: 'Anyone who claims they seek orgasm just for its own sake is full of shit.'
We find ourselves with the brains and reward systems we have. The good thing about human autonomy is that (in theory) we can often co-opt these systems for other motivations. Is it a neat capability we are in full control of? Absolutely not. But we can still distinguish why we do x from the historical reasons and general reasons for our proclivity to x.
It sounds like you're just rephrasing @faceh's point in different words. I don't see how "evolution gave us a brain that feels good when a person looks attractive when they have an audience, but not when they don't have an audience" is a meaningfully different assertion from "any woman who claims she dresses up 'for herself' is full of shit". Surely if dressing up feels good if and only if you have an audience, that logically implies that no one is really dressing up "for themselves".
ControlsFreak
1hr ago
Please elaborate on what you mean by "decent alcohol" and "good weed". I think there are some shenanigans with quality/potency/etc.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1hr ago
Pretending that this is a serious suggestion:
It's not the quantity of the beatings, but their accuracy. You need to
- correctly identify asocials, and catch them in the act and
- beat them appropriately and publicly.
And this is difficult because
- It takes a lot of attention and fine-toothed combing to separate social citizens from asocial ones who have learned to pretend to be social where necessary. They will obfuscate their asocial activities, limit them to settings in which they aren't observed closely, and always keep a plausible excuse handy. After a few months and years of beatings, only the stupidest will be asocial where they can be caught.
- If the beatings are too piddly, people will not take them seriously. If the beatings are excessive, people will hate the goons dishing them out rather than the poor asocial who just got his teeth knocked out for taking one minute too long on the loo, which weakens the entire institution. If the beatings happen in secret so that nobody can judge whether they were appropriate, you end up with some kafkaeske nightmare state like the soviet union or Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Either way, you raise up class of violent state-sanctioned thugs who beat people up for not loving the state enough. It's not a winning recipe in the long-term.
Botond173
2hr ago
A couple of things:
-
The “we pretend that we work, they pretend that they pay us” Soviet joke specifically originates from the post-Stalin era of thaw and stagnation and for a good reason, as the GULAG no longer existed
-
Marx was already convinced that revolutionary terror is necessary and described it as such
-
As you stated, the commies noticed that beating up selfish people for their acts of selfishness will successfully de-normalize selfishness socially; in a similar manner, beating people up for not caring about the common good will compel them to care about it or else – it’ll work just as much; however, this assumes that the goons and their commanders will never lose their stomachs for beating people up all the time
Rosencrantz2
2hr ago
That's not the crux though, one would expect evolution to give people a brain that feels good when a person looks attractive in public, rather than in private.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
2hr ago
That's...this is bait, right?
- The government is usually the biggest rent-seeking entity on the block, growing its body of sinecures with every year and funding it through value extracted from the productive classes at gunpoint.
- The government usually solves problems by implementing solutions that either don't work, or are hilariously cost-inefficient to the point where they could have done better by just distributing the money spent directly to the nominal beneficiaries. Which of course the government doesn't do, because the actually intended beneficiary is (some other part of) the government.
- Government is corrupt and wasteful; the private sector gets the blame.
I mean, epistemic gap, the rightist and the leftist see two different movies on one screen, yadda yadda. I'm perfectly willing to admit that private sector actors are also self-interested and will bend and exploit the rules as far as they can, but come on. The government is so much bigger, more powerful and further-reaching, it has every opportunity to prove how well it can solve problems. Pointing fingers at filthy corporats and kulaks, as if they were responsible for every government failure ever, regardless of which country and/or system we're talking about...
Rosencrantz2
2hr ago
But humans also have brains big enough to create elaborate, usually post-hoc justifications for actions they take, and so they can pretend that dressing and acting in a way that effectively short-circuits the other sex's thought processes (b/c horny) and claim its all solely motivated by self-empowerment.
Is that really hypocritical though? Suppose evolution makes it enjoyable to dress in a way that's sexy to men. Why can't women now take that system of enjoyment nature has given them, and use it to intentionally get enjoyment for themselves with attracting men becoming a side effect? It seems kinda similar to evolution making us like certain flavours to help us get the right range of nutrients. Modern foodies taking that capacity for enjoyment given to us by evolution, and employing it for their own non-survival ends. At least in theory, the original evolutionary cause of the impulse can be acknowledged, but then co-opted.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3hr ago
The upswing in "socialism"* of late is largely a reaction to the perceived failure of political systems to address socio-economic problems. In particular, the GFC, the failure of the ACA to address the capriciousness of the American healthcare system, climate change, and a general inability to hold economic elites to account for anti-social-but-legal behavior. The price of housing hasn't helped either.
Unfortunately, when people get mad, they often vote for stupid and/or self-destructive policies.
*I use scare quotes because to a large degree modern American socialism is simply a middle class left-populist movement. There are genuine exceptions, but when you press for policy details you'll generally find something that is not in any meaningful sense a break from the past 70 years of left-liberalism. A backlash against decades of "socialism is when the government does stuff" has greatly attenuated the negative connotations of the label.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
4hr ago
Fantastic story, had me grinning from ear to ear as I read it. Thanks for sharing! I do think your link is mistaken, though.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
4hr ago
I honestly can't relate to people who complain about not-dark mode. I don't find it hard on the eyes at all, so it's difficult for me to understand how anyone could be so fervently bothered by it. To each their own I suppose.
I asked a second question as well. To repeat:
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?
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