domain:houseofstrauss.com
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
4m ago
Buddy. Pal. Lemme level with you here.
Please don't be patronizing like this.
you did ask for an explanation of why you get downvoted so much.
I never asked for this, I asked if he had an idea why his post wasn't downvoted. The two are not congruent. It seems like you wanted to use this as an excuse to go "Oh boy, let me tell you why your posts suck. Buddy. Pal."
But OK, I'll bite. Maybe I'll get something out of this. But to do this well, we really need examples. Could you link an example of one of my posts that you think most egregiously exemplifies the behavior you're talking about? I can put forward this discussion that I linked earlier in the thread, but I'm not sure if you think that qualifies.
SSCReader
4m ago
But this poor family made a terrible decision because they've been lied to about reality their entire lives. They thought they could take the fruit of generations of convicted felons, and rescue him from his genetic destiny, because they didn't believe it was real.
Again though this isn't the point because 1) You can't tell as an infant what his genetic destiny was or is or how impacted it was by malnutrition, or fetal alcohol syndrome, or a drug addicted mother, or lead or what have you. And how much of that can be overcome. No-one can. Because there are plenty of adopted kids from "bad" parents who do in fact go on to live good if not great lives. No-one can tell in advance. Again someone has to raise them because we are not going to kill them. and 2) Were they lied too? Are you sure the social workers and so on involved with the adoption did not say "hey you know this is going to be difficult? You know adopting someone from this background, they may well have unknown issues? They're likely underweight malnourished that is going to have potentially long term consequences, to health and behavior? and so on and so forth.? Because in my experience the main issue is that prospective adoptive parents don't take warnings seriously, not that they are not given them. 3) You are robbing these adoptive parents of their agency. You claim that they were lied to, that they didn't understand, but they're adults. They made a choice, a good moral choice, that sounds like it hurt them long term, I am sympathetic to that. I spent enough time working in social care to really understand that. The moral imperative of blank slatism did not rob them of anything. They chose of their own free will to take on a moral burden. They sound like good people. But moral burdens have costs. If doing the moral thing was easy, everyone would do it. If they think it is too much for them, and have to hand the child back, then I won't judge them for that, because at least they tried. But the child did not choose to be brought into their home. They chose it. It is their responsibility until that point. He is not in any way invasive. He's damaged by the sound of it. That isn't the same thing. And he may well be so damaged that he needs 24 hour care in a professional setting. That happens. Again believe me, I've seen horrible things, done by parents and by children. I'm not advocating that they must keep the child regardless of the harm he is doing to them.
Blank slatism is nothing to do with this, because you have no way of knowing whether the nurture or nature part was the issue. And you don't know in advance how he will turn out, regardless of his lineage. That's the issue with your position. You build off your assumption that this was predictable. But most adopted kids, even black ones, even damaged ones, do in fact go on to lead reasonable lives. Yes with more difficulties and more criminality statistically. But unless you are literally going to kill them as children, they MUST be raised somehow. And adoptive families seem to give the best possible outcomes of the options we have.
This isn't a situation where we either nurture the invasive species or burn it, like if we were dealing with plants. We either nurture it and hope it grows up to have some quality of life for itself and others around it, or we don't nurture it and it will be even more likely to have lesser quality of life and to contribute negatively.
Or to put it another way, even if blank slatism is 100% false. What else can be done? The child must be raised. It's either going to be (in your scenario), be by the original mother (presumably neglectful or abusive, hence the adoption), the state in a facility, or an adopted family. Which of these is MOST likely to lead to some kind of positive outcome for child and society do you think? How can we tell for sure which is best for any given child as an infant? Our current system is to try and get as many adopted or fostered as possible, as this seems to give the kids the best possible chance, and then if we can't, or if they turn out to be too much for the foster/adoptive family we raise them in a group home or similar. And if they are too much for that, then..well there just aren't great options. Institutionalized and drugged or put in juvie or the equivalent really.
What should have been done with the infant in your scenario do you think? What percentage chance of turning out reasonably does he need to have before an adoptive family should be given the option to try?
I do have sympathy for your mother in law as well. Most of my time was in adult social care, so I am intimately familiar with violent adult children and the various broken cycles of attachment and how reluctant/fearful parents can be sometimes to admit that the behavior of their offspring goes beyond just acting out and is actually dangerous criminality. Getting them into care and treatment can be difficult. And of course many parents don't want to call the cops because they (often rightly) think mental illness is not coped well with by the justice system. It's a horrible situation I am sure, and I am sorry your family is experiencing it. If you were in the UK, I would probably have professional contacts who might be able to help. As it is, I'll simply hope that your mother and father in law do realize the extent of the issues before something worse happens.
aldomilyar
5m ago
The 'Japanese people didn't differentiate between blue and green and different cultures have sat the border at different places therefore Hot Pink and Cerulean are the same color' argument comes up surprisingly often.
aardvark2
5m ago
It is only rightist relative to usual high education online spaces cleansed from rightists.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
6m ago
The heck is going on with the motte servers, or is it just me? Got a nginx crash homepage a day or two ago, and loading slowly for me today.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
10m ago
God, while I'm not happy about being paid about half what my US peers make, I suppose I should count my blessings in that none of this nonsense comes up in my actual job. And that's despite the UK being, in some ways, more Woke than even 2023-America.
(You can't pay me enough to work in the ER)
I can only hope that nobody takes away the message that this is a representative sampling of what actual ER doctors go through, or how they act, even if some of the specific incidents strike me as things that could have happened. Not an expert on the day to day realities of medical work in the States, so hopefully @Throwaway05 has something to add.
Though, to be fair:
We get jokes about drug addicts with nicknames, jokes about frat boys in car wrecks, jokes about whether a medical student killed someone or just got unlucky.
Are all things that do actually happen. The writers of the show have done at least some homework.
jake
15m ago
This implies adequate compartmentalization of intel, and we know that doesn't happen. Were there something substantive that indicted Trump and also indicted a bunch of boomer dems, one of the dozens of bright-eyed young socialists in all those retinues would have seen it and said "Fuckin' two birds" and dumped it to the press.
Even the righty wet dream scenario where the DNC itself would cease to exist from >90% of its major personnel being indicted still demands an answer to the question of why a radical in the lower ranks doesn't release it. They aren't all ruthless realpolitikers, plenty are true believers in socialism as a winning platform and that the DNC only loses elections because they aren't radical enough. That's means and motive.
The last challenge point was the election. That nothing was released after November 6 is proof nothing substantive exists.
I quite enjoy Eric Weinstein's commentary on Epstein and how Epstein is a window into similar constructs.
Weinstein can sometimes be insufferable and it was hard to get through his latest appearance on Diary of a CEO podcast. Steven Bartlett was really out of his depth as an interviewer and Weinstein constantly violated The Motte's 'Speak Plainly' rule, but there was a lot there about the 'construct that was Epstein' and non-pedophile related angles like influence over scientists (Hawking, Harvard Grads etc). It was also funny in the video to see Bartlett freak out when Weinstein talked about how certain interests might try to capture and control 'human terrain' (read:influencers).
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
19m ago
When I visited NZ, I was pretty surprised by the fact that they just aerially drop broad-spectrum mammal poison in large areas of the country. With (almost) no native mammals (a few bats), I guess it makes sense ecologically, but from my continental (from-a-continent-not-an-island) perspective it's a choice.
EDIT: This is intended as an interesting tangential anecdote, not an allegory.
Tanista
19m ago
Create a pro-American superhero narrative that gets released to the same theaters that Woke Marvel goes to
This implies that Hollywood (and academia) will be the last to flip because no one else* is going to make $200 million movies regularly. It's just not viable.
You basically have to wait until an AI-driven paradigm shift can let weird nerds like Lucas make non-horror blockbusters for ~$60 million that look world class again.
* Well, maybe barring the Chinese.
thejdizzler
20m ago
Just wanted to say I admire your ability to keep an open mind despite defending your beliefs strongly!
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
25m ago
That was after 2003, when the letter appears to have been written. I wanna say 2007?
Totalitarianit
33m ago
What would you like to know?
aardvark2
34m ago
The other explanation could be that proximity of blacks causes white criminality to go up too. Crime is infectious.
WhiningCoil
35m ago
Well, the 401k has been trucking along about 20 years, with 9% of my income (5% contribution, 4% match). The brokerage account I've had about 10 years, and bitcoin has been an 8 year accumulation. Most of my "active" investing has taken place in the last 8 years.
There were a smattering of minor setbacks that came out of the emergency fund. New well pump, birth of my child, etc. Nothing in the six figure range, or even much above $10,000 at a shot. Buying a house with 20% down in 2021 was probably the largest "set back" if all you care about is maximizing contributions to an investment account. But despite the opportunity cost of being out around $100,000 for the down payment, it's been worth it. I don't really include the appreciation on the house in my "Fuck You" goal, but I do include the fixed cost of keeping a roof over my head compared to the rental market, as well as avoiding all the instability of having to deal with a market for shelter at all. You see debates on the rent vs buy math all the time, but I can promise you the buy in 2021 versus rent today math absolutely works out in favor of "buy in 2021"
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
38m ago
A while back, when I was younger and less jaded, I did consider a career as a neurosurgeon specializing in brain implants. I (wisely) desisted, because neurosurgery is brutally difficult to break into, and I'd be in training or struggling to build a name for myself for a decade or more.
I wouldn't recommend anyone get their brain implants from me, though I will shill affiliate links when Neuralink cuts me a cheque.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
38m ago
Of course I did. Like @No_one correctly understood, I meant point defenses that shoot the drones down as they dive at the target. You can't cover a country the size of Ukraine, but you can protect the parts of your infrastructure that you can't just move underground or at least into a forest.
The interceptors are there mainly for cruise and ballistic missiles.
magicalkittycat
39m ago
It’s funny to me that in real life, many a man will cop to being friends with various kinds of scumbags with the “yeah, I wouldn’t want him to marry my sister, but he never did anything to me” reasoning, but somehow when it comes to celebrity I’m expected to be scandalized that people stayed friends with Epstein even though he had a thing for 16 year old girls (whom they may well have believed were 18 anyway)
How many of those scumbag men are accused of being ringleaders of international sex trafficking schemes (allegedly) providing for rich elites from across the world like royalty and party leaders? That seems a lot different to me than just "he had a thing for 16 year olds"
Also not just 16 year olds, one of the lawsuits alleged as young as 12
Even a thousand Epsteins wouldn’t be as bad as, say, the Rotherham scandal where 12 year olds were being sexually tortured and pimped to hundreds or thousands of strangers, sometimes dozens a day.
Yeah the Rotherham scandal is bad but is it hard to understand why people tend to care more about international elites more than they do gang members? People have always been interested in the drama of the powerful upper class and celebrities more than they are of the peasants.
aardvark2
40m ago
Has psychiatry adopted to that there are highly online people now and even "normal" life or many jobs necessarily require smartphones? They could have developed some screening model which operates on patients message history (doesn't even require a LLM to do it).
AvocadoPanic
42m ago
Where / which Costco in Sacramento?
I grew up in Sacramento, the unincorporated areas of Sacramento County.
Sacramento has frequently seen demographic change, and there were often 'ethnic' neighboords or areas. I've of photo of my grandmother's nearly all white graduating class (1939) from C.K. McClatchy High School. Even the suburbs (built in the early 1950's) my grandparents lived in have seen substantial changes. It had been tree lined and owner occupied, now mostly rentals and all the Modesto Ash were cut down.
I had been away for ~15 years before going back for the first time in 2015. I made another trip in 2016.
The people and places I miss aren't there anymore.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
43m ago
I was in the gym three times this week. I started the Jim Stoppani Beginner to Advanced program and, after roughly two years away from the gym, my lifts are somewhere between humbling and humiliating. On the other hand, at least I’m doing it.
On the gripping hand, I also did two sparring sessions, for about an hour each, and those went much, much better in the ego realm. I just have years of skill and experience on anyone else at the new club, and so even being very rusty (noticeably so to myself), I was able to spar in a pretty relaxed and casual manner and still do very well. Which is good because I needed the ego boost after the lifting.
On the other gripping hand, while I can do plenty to build up the skill level of the other people at the club, being a big fish in a small pond is the way to stagnate. I’ll have to think about ways to regularly get to other clubs and work with better fighters. In the interim, I aim to at least clean up my own technique so that I, personally, feel less sloppy.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
44m ago
I don't understand what you mean by this. Is it that people often make this claim, therefore it must be wrong or something?
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
47m ago
I think what will force the reckoning is not sincere questions, but losing ground in the business. Not just “people don’t go see the Palestinian genocide narrative supporting Superman, but people actively choose to support superheroes who espouse things they actually believe in. Create a pro-American superhero narrative that gets released to the same theaters that Woke Marvel goes to and I think they’ll at least downplay the Message. Have a pro-American, pro-Western Oikophillic Space Opera (maybe a revived Flash Gordon) release at the same time as Star Wars Old Republic, and when Star Wars flops, they might get the message.
For much too long, the Cathedral institutions have not faced an actual challenger. There are no real classical education modeled colleges and universities to challenge the chokehold that modern universities have on the student population. There aren’t many movies in mainstream distribution that really have traditional themes in them.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
53m ago
How long did it take?
Any major financial setbacks along the way? (Medical bills, non-insured damage to the house etc.)
just noticed this too - went to check the subreddit and it has 19k readers?? Since when? Is it just a bot paradise haha
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