domain:freddiedeboer.substack.com
WhiningCoil
4hr ago
I don't think you understand. In order to work at a Fairfax, VA McDonalds, you need to speak spanish in order to communicate with the rest of the staff. They literally won't hire you.
Well, that's not 100% true. I saw a single white teenager working at a Burger King around 2009 in Reston, VA. His coworkers were laughing and carrying on during the lunch rush flipping burgers, and he was all alone, head down, working the fry machine. Couldn't understand anything anyone was saying around him. One of the most depressing things I'd ever seen in my life.
Last time I was in Loudoun County, 2015-ish you could still find entry level work as a native English speaker. The Roy Rogers in Leesburg was staffed entirely by very polite local highschoolers. That may have changed in the last 10 years though.
jake
1hr ago
When I was in high school I spent a couple summers lifeguarding for my city's public pools. My parents suggested it but they didn't require it, and it was largely my mother's doing. I've always loved swimming, I never did it competitively but all the time recreationally, and my mom also loved swimming, and I think she recommended it because she had a sense about these things, obvious as it is, that her teenage son would enjoy getting paid to spend summers at the pool.
I did. I never thought of it as work, I still don't. It's very funny to me how it does not parse at all in my memories as a job. I was hanging out with people my age, or girls just a bit older than me who were all thin and attractive and in skintight lifeguard suits. It was also a nice pool and this was the 00s so most people going were thin, other than the classic fat dad or chubby mom. It's lifeguarding so it built responsibility, and I think I'm a better person for it, for all of it. As far as summer activity options for high schoolers, lifeguarding must be high on the stack for socialization and peer esteem. I'll fully recommend this to my kids, but as with my parents, not require it, and for the same reason as I suspect from my mom. Work ethic, get in touch with the working class? The pocket money is nice, but nah. Hang out at the pool, socialize, exercise, flirt with girls. That's just a good summer.
WhiningCoil
4hr ago
This is a long story, but I'm getting to a point, I swear.
A buddy of mine in college converted to Mormonism to date a girl. He was a character, but this story is going to be winding enough without getting into that. One day we went over to his girlfriend's house to meet before we all left to go see Lord of the Rings in theaters. I forget which one, maybe Fellowship. It doesn't matter.
It's around Christmas time, and this huge Mormon family is bursting at the seems with wholesome energy. Every little girl wants to show you want they've been baking with their mother. Every little boy wants to show you their somersault or some trick. The house is decorated, the Christmas tree is up, good times. So me and a buddy of mine are awkwardly sitting in the living room, not really sure what to do or say because this is not a vibe we grew up with. In addition to our usual awkwardness I might add. And two of these kids are throwing a little toy football closer and closer to the Christmas tree. My buddy and I, we don't say anything, but we're looking at each other with a panicked expression that needs no words. We are both thinking, if that ball actually hits that tree, a kid is gonna die in front of us.
Anyways, ball hits the tree, ornaments fall, train doing loops around the base falls over aaaaaaaand.... nothing. Dad chuckles, asks them to take it outside, life carries on like nothing ever happened. The boys clean up the mess they made and go throw the ball around outside. After my buddy and I piled into the car to go see the movie once everyone had arrived, we talked about how Christmas was at our homes growing up. How the house was transformed into a veritable museum of Christmas, and our mothers would fly into a violent rage if they so much as heard an ornament jingle due to a single heavy step within 20 feet of the tree. And it slowly dawned on us, that we were the fucked up ones. That family we just visited, they were the happy well adjusted ones.
It sucks realizing in your 20's that you were raised wrong. And not just "could have done better, but basically OK", but fundamentally the opposite of how you should have been raised. With all your intuitions about family dynamics and how to view and treat loved ones horrifically and possibly permanently miswired. It sucks watching the increasingly small demographic of well adjusted, family oriented peers you may have politely filtering you out and pairing off. It sucks getting older and realizing, you've been left behind with the other rejects, and now you've got to find the least damaged item in the returns bin to try to build a life with, knowing full well that's all you are to someone else as well.
I have no fucking clue how I did it. I have no fucking clue how anyone else is expected to do it today, except that it seems even more impossible, and the odds even more remote. But it sucks seeing all the "good ones" taken, and it hurts even worse realizing that goes for you too.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4hr ago
Send your kid to work at McDonald's, good for them, builds character. Who cares if Asians take 25% of Ivy League seats and conservatives find themselves increasingly locked out of the American elite?
The things Asians are having their kids do aren't really things that help them grow or learn, they're just a box checking exercise to help them get into college.
The question of how you get into the ivy league is entirely determined by what admissions officers decide gets you into the ivy league. Given that most of the elite colleges have shown themselves vulnerable to political bullying, it would be fairly easy for the government to order them to favor candidates who had part-time or summer jobs over candidates who didn't. This would benefit everyone.
Summer jobs are good for kids. They build independence. They put them into hierarchies that are different from the ones they are used to at home or in school. They get them out of the house and help them meet people. They are capital-G Good.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
1hr ago
Not quite. His attorney got ahold of the items somehow, but then turned them over to the FBI when asked for them. You can rest assured that they were the same items the FBI initially found, and speculating otherwise is being a conspiracy theorist.
Also, during that search:
On the first floor, agents also found a plastic bin tucked under a bookshelf in an office. The bin was filled with hard drives.
The hard drives all had tamper-proof "evidence" tape on them when the FBI found them, Maguire testified.
Nothing suspicious about that.
At the very least, an itemized list of images found on those hard drives and CDs would constitute "the Epstein files" that could be released.
HMK2
4hr ago
In my home area, Northern Virginia, all the jobs that teens used to do - fast food, lawnmowing, child care - are now done by adult Central American immigrants. It's been that way for thirty years or so!
I have no idea how (other than lifeguarding at pools) kids are supposed to earn money nowadays.
erwgv3g34
7hr ago
From Slate Star Scratchpad:
Public service announcement: if you have a kid with some kind of horrifying predatory criminal, and now your kid is a horrifying predatory criminal, and you have no idea how this happened because the father left before he was even born and your new husband is a great guy and you’ve both always done your best to raise your kid well and give him a good home, your kid’s psychiatrist will listen empathetically to your story, and then empathetically give you a copy of The Nurture Assumption.
…maybe not actually. But it will definitely be on his mind. And maybe it would get people to stop having so many kids with horrifying predatory criminals. Seriously, I’m doing inpatient child psychiatry now and I get multiple cases like this every day.
Other lessons from child psychiatry:
Don’t sexually molest your kids. I am so serious about this.
Did you know there are whole institutions for dealing with kids who sexually molest other kids? And these institutions are always full? The world is much worse than anybody thinks and I cannot finish up my child psychiatry rotation quickly enough.
Seriously, sometimes (and I don’t endorse this, and trigger warning this is horribly offensive) I feel like passing out bingo cards with every conceivable relative and every conceivable form of abuse. “Stepfather molests stepdaughter” would be the free space in the center. But we could also have “Father beats mother”, “Mother beats father”, “Parents beat kid”, “Kid beats parents”, “Brother molests sister”, “Sister stabs brother”, and so on. I’m not saying you would go through the day with one of these cards. That would be too easy. I’m saying you would have to try to get a bingo with a single patient.
Seriously, don’t have kids with horrifying predatory criminals. THIS NEVER HELPS.
The weirder the spelling of a traditional name (”Aireene”, “Maichel”) the longer the kid’s criminal record. This is true regardless of race.
The more kids you have by age 16, the more likely it is that each one of those kids will grow up to be a fine upstanding citizen who contributes many useful things to society. Or at least that had better be true, for all of our sakes.
The prevalence of ADHD in Our Lady Of An Undisclosed Location Child Psychiatry Unit is holding steady at 100%.
HAVE I MENTIONED NOT HAVING KIDS WITH HORRIFYING PREDATORY CRIMINALS? I FEEL LIKE THIS IS A SURPRISINGLY UNDEREXPLORED STRATEGY.
Lizzardspawn
3hr ago
This might lead you to wonder if maybe you should learn something from the wealthiest racial group in America. But no, the author doesn't suggest that. Send your kid to work at McDonald's, good for them, builds character. Who cares if Asians take 25% of Ivy League seats and conservatives find themselves increasingly locked out of the American elite?
Modern education is a total waste of life. You spend 17 years to learn something that should take 3-4 at most.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
5hr ago
Maybe the reason Trump doesn't understand why it keeps going is because he doesn't have an inferiority complex about class that drives him into fantasy about elite pedophile rings.
Seething about people having an inferiority complex. That's the kind of irony I come to the motte for.
If a game gets worse when you play the meta then it's just a shallow, badly designed game.
This sounds right, but is it true?
Chess is a famously enduring centuries old game, the goto example of refined design which even you cite. Yet I think your impression about it is wrong. Basically every GM has a quote about how high level play is a boring memory game. And 960 became popular for a reason. It's not entirely unfun, but it's a lot less fun (and arguably less entertaining) than 1500 level play.
Football is celebrated as one of the best ball games ever created and enjoys popularity on the scale of the whole human race. It's well known for it's upset outcomes and the general unpredictability to the last minute. And yet, it too has a well known problem where mid to high skilled play can be incredibly boring 0-0 matches where nothing happens because a dominant strategy at those levels is to play quite defensively for most of the match and aim for a last minute killing stroke.
Motorsport is well known for its pattern of very long periods of boring dominance intermediated by legendary high stakes races where it's anybody's game. And that's despite the best efforts of its organizers to tweak the rules to prevent dominance as much as possible. It seems to constantly naturally arise out of the business dynamics of the companies involved and the technical characteristics of the cars varying over time.
My theory is that the level of fun at meta level play is actually not a common or required characteristic of good games. The sporadic entertainment value they provide is what's selected for at those levels, alongside fun for the median player.
Fighting games are actually like this: it is fun to watch high level players and fun to play the game at an intermediate level yourself, but whether or not the high level players enjoy themselves is I think immaterial to their success.
This is also true of all the above: playing chess with friends, a pickup footie, or racing your buddies in lemons is a lot of fun. And GM galaxy brained moves, Champions League upsets and F1 drama are fun to watch and talk about.
aqouta
10m ago
It's not a kind thing to say, but anything over a little pudge is actively revolting to me.
jake
12m ago
CPT apropos Epstein is the easiest way for frothing antisemites, e.g.; Andrew Torba, to cloak their animus in something ostensibly reasonable. Torba is clear about what he thinks, it's his motivations he gets to hide. Today he's playing panican on X. He isn't mad because he believes in a general sexmonster conspiracy being swept under the rug, he's mad because he believes jews orchestrated that sexmonster conspiracy (as if American politicians were famously free of deviancy before) and if unmasked we could finally begin expunging their influence and usher in a new American golden age.
I think Epstein was an op, just one that equally implicates multiple nations. Pizzagate was something entirely separate, but the righties have their wires crossed thinking these were all one thing. Epstein's Island involved 16/17 year old girls, and rarely 16/17 year old boys, being paid to have sex with various wealthy and powerful men. Pizzagate involved high-power dems and DC figures, among others, raping children who were then probably quite often murdered. One involves an activity legal in all of Europe where the problem they would have is that money changed hands. It is a simple taboo that we should punish as it functions as a critical test for good socialization, I just can't pretend there's anything actually unusual about a man wanting to have sex with a 17 year old girl. The other, as we all know and as Greer notes here, is a problem universally agreed upon as solved by woodchippers. They're not on the same planet of severity.
kky
20m ago
This might lead you to wonder if maybe you should learn something from the wealthiest racial group in America. But no, the author doesn't suggest that. Send your kid to work at McDonald's, good for them, builds character. Who cares if Asians take 25% of Ivy League seats and conservatives find themselves increasingly locked out of the American elite?
Is the argument here that you should ape the wealthy regardless of your own norms and values, or that striver Asians are universally living good lives? If it's the latter, color me surprised, a lot of them are IME quite angry about the whole situation and hate/fetishize whites to a pretty uncanny degree. Is that the aim here?
But if he's well adjusted, does well in school, and has lots of friends, there's no reason to make him work manual labor because someone conservative writer who attended a third-rate university told you it's an "American folkway."
Going further, it's bad to raise your kids in some way or another because someone else told you to. On the other hand, it's good to raise them in that way because you personally believe it to be a good thing.
There's not a lot of meat on this bone. You very briefly mention the kinds of reasons why people might want their kids to try their hand at working before leaving the nest. You do not engage with them in any depth, and your refutation stops at saying "this is stupid." OK, in that case, what is the good life that these parents should aspire to providing for their children? You got something, right? The only thing I'm hearing is "genetic confounding" which, when I plug it into ChatGPT, comes out as "do nothing and trust the plan." Otherwise, this post is effectively just "explain to me why you'd want your kids to go working" with a lot of unearned snark.
WhiningCoil
8hr ago
So, I know a couple that tried to do a good thing. They adopted a young ghetto boy as an infant, removed him from all the bad influences that afflicted his community, and raised him in a middle-upper class environment with the best private schools, institutions and cultural guidance western civilization could provide.
The boy has terrorized that poor family for over a decade now with no signs of relenting. If this were a nature versus nurture debate, nurture is in a fetal position, ribs kicked in, begging for death as nature relentless curb stomps her.
It's all well and good to want to plant seeds, and failing to plant your own, nurture what you can find. Just make sure you aren't nurturing some virulent invasive species that will leave the land barren.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
would be impossible without cooperation from practically the entire Department of Corrections
Why would we rule this out? Prison guards are notorious for accepting bribes and the typical theory names the Clintons, who have rather more connections than the average person. Ditto for the royal family, the mossad, and other commonly-pointed-to culprits.
The prison system is not very invested in enforcing the formal 'rules' of the system when it involves protecting criminals.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
3hr ago
I question whether a reasonable person can read about the Epstein case and conclude that it doesn’t demand additional investigation. It wasn’t normal that Epstein’s activities were secretly funded by America’s most important pro-Israel lobbyist. It wasn’t normal that he rigged his rooms with videographic equipment. It wasn’t normal that he went to visit Israeli military bases in 2008 while on trial. It wasn’t normal that Ehud Barak, the former PM of Israel and former head of Israeli military intelligence, visited him 36 times. It’s not normal for former Mossad agent Ari Ben-Menashe to tell journalists that he was told Epstein was military intelligence. It’s not normal that Epstein’s assistant was the daughter of a Mossad spy.
If we’re incapable of protecting the country from this kind of threat then we should just surrender to China. The Chinese will be more a little more reasonable about this thing. They would have already executed dozens of people.
Tree
1hr ago
It’s always been weird, because rafa would lose enormous amounts of status in such a system. Right now the PMC, doctors bankers lawyers are at the top of the status pyramid because it’s their bourgeois regime. Replace it with rigid generational classes, and rafa’s title and status would be downgraded to ‘banking clerk‘. Just like it was in the good old days. And rafa works like 60 hours a week or something, which is huge, but most people do not feel this pressure, and they don't need to be "liberated" from it/re-enslaved in a guild by the revolution.
Shrike
2hr ago
I am spitballing here but I have definitely wondered if places with longstanding minority groups just are able to handle integration much better than places where the very same groups are new. In other words, in this scenario, possibly you are both right and it's just that DFW, which has ~always had a significant Hispanic presence compared to Fairfax, Virginia, is much better culturally at handling the situation.
It would be odd if it were not at least somewhat that way, imho.
gattsuru
4hr ago
Send your kid to work at McDonald's, good for them, builds character. Who cares if Asians take 25% of Ivy League seats and conservatives find themselves increasingly locked out of the American elite?
Saying one thing, then saying another, does not actually tie these things to each other. There was an entire and recent court case at SCOTUS specifically about how Harvard does not select the makeup of its student body from mere academic records or test scores, and just like New York's carry permit rates post-Bruen, Harvard has been hard and heavy at defying SFFA.
Sending your kid to put eighteen hours a day into study over their summer vacation will not get them to Harvard. Pushing them to have a hundred very marketable extracurriculars, which is another part of the equation here and goes very overlooked by the Compass, also won't. I think you already know that.
John Adams said, "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."
It's a little funny that only 'mathematics' is the only part of that list that overlaps with the modern College Prep Uber Allies approach, and it's becoming an increasingly smaller portion of the focus. That's both the problem, and the kinda damning fault of this sort of rant. There's fair arguments about the tradeoff between the 50% chance of success at a mid-tier college and Mike Roweism, or about tradeoffs between education and work experience (so long as you don't flinch when anyone mentions what post-grad degrees do to total lifetime income). There are some less fair arguments where we compare college grads to non-college graduates and mumble whenever everyone mentions external variables, but are still worth knowing about.
Turning the debate into An Ivy League graduation specifically versus flipping burgers for a summer isn't just putting a thumb on the scales, it's throwing out any pretense of balanced evaluation.
Grant_us_eyes
2hr ago
I've never experienced this directly, but it was depressing as hell watching a friend of mine trying to find someone to marry; here was a guy extremely fit, handsome, very well off, retired before 40, with a hobby list as long as my arm, and he still struggled to find a long-term partner.
I couldn't help but watch all this in action and left helplessly thinking, 'Christ, if HE'S having problems, what chance do I have?'
He did eventually get married to a wonderful woman, however, but he's still had to make a number of quiet sacrifices. Nothing technically major, but still...
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
Probably. I have noticed that whites in certain fields(especially restaurant trades- cook, manager, stuff like that. Not the jobs students/kids do.) have mostly learnt Spanish, that there are self-segregated mostly-black kitchens and groceries, and that bosses expect to have to translate between different kinds of entry-level workers in certain places- construction in particular, but also sometimes warehouses.
he heart and soul of the thing seems to be conspiracy beliefs.
The only reason Trump, the ridiculous candidate, became a political titan is because he alone was willing to take the side of the people who think the system is rigged, and they were willing to shoot him at "Killary" out of pure spite. The subsequent decade was only a confirmation of this dynamic. We've been living in the 2016 election since then.
Trump doing a heel turn into just another corrupt elite nullifies half of his appeal. All that remains is him being economically right wing.
fantasy
Where there is smoke, smoldering ruins and dozens of firefighters still shooting water, there's fire.
Before Trump himself started to act in this extremely and transparently suspicious manner I was under the impression that the Epstein case would ruin the lives of a few connected celebrities and rich donors and add one scandal to the CIA's list. Now I don't know what to believe.
Gaashk
1hr ago
Some people I know have been trying to foster and/or adopt, because they're unable to have biological kids, and it is super difficult and uncertain. The system will often find a relative after several years, then spend a long time placing the child with that relative, sometimes a sibling when they come of age, and sometimes the teen just absconds because they don't like being parented all that much.
Maybe you should do it, good foster parents are great, but don't go into it assuming that you'll get a kid who will choose to stay with you until they're 22, or will listen to your good advice, and follow your sensible rules.
WhiningCoil
6hr ago
I do, but you don't. Telling people "git gud" without any notion of how they do is less than worthless. You don't even have proof that they can. Who do you point to to show it's possible, if not yourself?
Can I let you in on a little secret? You know what me and my married friends sometimes talk about? We aren't bragging about how much better than our younger contemporaries we are, or patting each other on the back about how we "got gud". We talks about how fucking lucky we are to be 40 and married, and not 20 or 30 and single. That we met our spouses before swiping, and tiktok. Before Andrew Tate. On both sides! Men and women both are clinging to their spouses like the last lifeboat on the Titanic, because it doesn't take a genius to see how utterly fucked the dating landscape is. The sheer hellscape of modern dating and gender relations has probably done more for the security of my marriage, and many others, than anything else.
I'm on the other side, and even I don't see how anybody is expected to do it if they haven't already these days! Y'all are fucked.
I know Alex. Everyone knows Alex. There are uncontacted tribes in the Amazon rainforest who know that you are unhappy with the 'low-iq' people, Alex. That's why you are seething, not just complaining. One difference between seething and complaining is that complaining isn't obsessive. Another is the impetus - if you actually felt superior to those people but incapable of engaging them (which is how you would improve things, as I have told you already) you would be more afraid than annoyed. And yet you seethe. Never worry. Just constant pissy attempts to smear your enemies with whatever is at hand no matter how weak or tangential. Of course even when you hit on an interesting topic of discussion, you still pissily use it to mock the lower classes, who you openly regard as inferior, for having an inferiority complex.
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