domain:kvetch.substack.com
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
23hr ago
New poll on Trump and Epstein:
Republicans are split with 40 percent approving of the way the Trump administration is handling the Jeffrey Epstein files, 36 percent disapproving and 24 percent not offering an opinion.
This, along with Operation Warp Speed, is the only time they are willing to break with Trump. The heart and soul of the thing seems to be conspiracy beliefs.
“He’s dead for a long time. He was never a big factor in terms of life. I don’t understand why the Jeffrey Epstein case would be of interest to anybody," Trump told reporters after being asked about frustration from his supporters over handling of the case.
"It's pretty boring stuff. It's sordid, but it's boring, and I don't understand why it keeps going. I think really only pretty bad people, including fake news, want to keep something like that going. But credible information? Let them give it — anything that's credible, I would say, let them have it," Trump added.
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.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
19hr ago
any consequences are going to happen even for the most vilest shit imaginable
People will not be punished for imaginary crimes.
kky
21hr ago
Sorry buddy, Rambo rules apply, you drew first blood. Your whole post was spurred by a single dollar estimate taken totally out of context from that poor guy’s Substack, and what he was saying has zero bearing on anything you said. In reality, he could have said anything at all, it didn’t matter what, you would have read whatever you wanted out of it. That’s why it’s all about you. You don’t need to make it about yourself explicitly; your post is saturated with yourself. You couldn’t even keep it down enough to read what the guy wrote! No protesting, I brought receipts.
If you want to complain about Society, do it on your own. Don’t twist other people’s words into it.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
20hr ago
Scott Greer has a good article on this:
This issue is important to much of the Right due to the belief in “Critical Pedo Theory.” This notion imagines that the world is ruled by a pedophile cabal and “systemic pedophilia” is inherent to the current order. These elite pedos are evil by nature, which is why they use space lasers to cause forest fires and wield their weather machine against red states. These right-wingers hoped Trump would battle the cabal as president. QAnoners thought he did so in his first term, clinging to fake news stories about the admin secretly arresting and executing prominent child molesters.
The Epstein announcement came as a shock. Here’s their leader telling them that a core element of their worldview isn’t true. Rather than follow Trump’s advice and move on, they’re up in arms, with some threatening to ditch MAGA altogether. It illustrates how fundamental CPT is to a large cohort of conservatives. Trump bombing Iran and implying he may be open to some form of amnesty didn’t elicit anywhere near this kind of backlash from his base. For a significant number of Trump voters, the pedo cabal matters more than anything else.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
17hr ago
Wait, you're telling me a criminal destroyed evidence?
Sounds pretty normal actually.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
21hr ago
Where there is smoke, smoldering ruins and dozens of firefighters still shooting water, there's fire.
There's people telling you there's no fire, which you interpret as evidence the fire is being covered up.
rae
14hr ago
Look a single dude straight in the eye and say "Yeah she's banged 6-12 dudes prior to you, but I'm sure that she won't ever be thinking about any of them or comparing your performance and YOU'RE the one she's going to stick with" with a straight face.
This is just your insecurity talking. You're afraid that you might be worse off in some way than a previous partner, and thinking of sex like it's a "performance" instead of viewing it as a mutual exploration of intimacy, pleasure, and most importantly, as a way to bond with your partner.
Also 6-12 partners, those are rookie numbers. Like I could understand being weirded out by your partner having over 50 hook-ups, but 6-12 is perfectly normal in this day and age.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
19hr ago
I clicked through and found:
The main issue cited by the court in its decision was that McCaffery exchanged “hundreds” of pornographic emails with lawyers in the Pennsylvania attorney general’s office during the years that Tom Corbett, now the governor, was attorney general.
That's really all. Just like leftists have to invent hate hoaxes because of the shortage of real violent white supremacists, there's a shortage of real elite pedophiles, so they have to make a scandal over some adult men emailing legal porn to other adult men. It's why they're always circling back to Epstein, the kernel of truth they use to support their worldview, even as he recedes further and further into the past.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
18hr ago
Its the asymmetry that grates me.
They have a uterus. You don't.
That is the asymmetry.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
20hr ago
I have no idea how (other than lifeguarding at pools) kids are supposed to earn money nowadays.
They could get jobs, unemployment rate is very low.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
22hr ago
It's a pregnancy risk, sure, but, life's full of risks. One of my ex's whole family was fat af, and they managed to reproduce.
Maybe next time before you pass on a fat girl, you could give her a chance for a little while, with the idea of suggesting Ozempic or an exercise plan once the relationship is more established? Just a thought. Could help widen your pool of available options a bit.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
22hr ago
Some of them became single moms, some decided to get into deeper debt for a master's degree, some of them got fat.
Again with the fat, it's always the fat... is it really that much of a dealbreaker?
I think fat girls are sexy af, so I'm biased, and I'm aware my biases are not shared by everyone. But, it can't be that bad, right?
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
23hr ago
young ghetto boy ... virulent invasive species that will leave the land barren.
Whelp that's enough of TheMotte for me today.
Anyway, my bigger concern in the US is actually having a healthcare crisis with my child and becoming destitute, especially since I've worked diligently to create a life of relative comfort compared to my very blue collar ancestors.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
6hr ago
I happened to luck out and eventually find one of the few remaining friendly, docile, feminine women left and married her.
I understand wanting to marry a woman who is friendly and feminine. But docile? Not to imply anything about your sexual proclivities, but the only time I see that used as a positive descriptor of a relationship partner is when talking about sexual submissiveness. And wanting your partner to act docile in bed is different from wanting them to be docile in normal life. So I'd like to understand why you list that as a desirable trait in a life partner.
kky
16hr ago
I appreciate talking specifics here!
For the first part: $70k is well within the target range. The numbers I picked up said it was actually a little high. However - point being - while the average 1bed costs somewhere in the $1,600-$1,700 range, that means that half of them are BELOW that in cost, matching the roughly 50% of workers occupying that income range. So, in fact, you can get below the average and still meet the concrete requirements that he sets. Here's a link out to some cities with REALLY cheap rent. When you're talking $1k/mo or less, you could practically get away with minimum wage. Not saying you necessarily want to live there, but considering that the cities he has top of mind are NYC and SF rather than Des Moines and Madison, you should expect the number to be skewed.
And that's my point! He gives an estimate that is highly specific to the kind of coastal city he's used to (the guy's from Portland, OR), and the only reason to index that estimate highly is if you're trying to live in a similar city. (He's actually pretty far off even for Portland - median rent there is $1,380, which puts target income at around $50,000 - median income is just shy of that at $47,000, making it within reason for a single guy and well within budget if it helps you land a girl to help pay rent.) So the number is not what matters. He even caveats the number as "probably." I'd certainly caveat it as "probably," given that it's the wrong number, but I'm not here to beat up on the guy over the math he did or did not do before his fingers hit the upper row of his keyboard. I'm here to say that the meat of that paragraph is this sentence, edited down to exclude all bait:
It’s a job that pays you enough to afford your own apartment, own a car, and pay for an adult lifestyle.
Now we hit the real point of contention. Can the average American afford their own apartment, own a car, and pay for an adult lifestyle? When you consider that the costs of these things scale based on place and class, the answer seems to be a pretty confident yes, most men have the potential to do it, even assuming a relatively luxurious (but not frivolous) American adult lifestyle. If we're looking at the type of person who he is trying to advise, the kind of person who has even heard of Substack or who is willing to hire a dating counselor, I'd estimate that the number approaches 100%.
Let's go back to what you said in the beginning.
Although much of the post is the standard dress better, be fit, be more interesting shtick, one thing that really rubbed me the wrong way was Get Better Soon's insistence that you had to be making at least $70k to be thinking about having a girlfriend, as well as living by yourself and preferably owning your own house/car. Now the median income in the US in $60k, and even controlling for the fact that men out-earn women, Get Better Soon is effectively saying here that more than 50% of men in the US are undateable.
I've highlighted the two assertions that seem totally unsupportable to me after reading the guy's actual post. He doesn't insist on $70k, he spitball estimates it, and he's wrong. Oops. As for the second, here's what he actually says:
The good news however, is that nearly all men can clear the bar if they’re willing to work on themselves...
This is why I'm accusing you of reading what you want out of the piece rather than what's actually there. If you told this guy "hey, I read a Substack post the other day that said you need to make more than the national average income to have a chance at scoring a woman," and then revealed to him it was his post, I bet he'd be shocked at the twist reveal. Call him innumerate, sure, but actually talk about what he wants to talk about. Are those fair standards for a job? Can nearly all men live up to them? I think so, on both counts. But, if we're being honest, assuming that there's a substantial contingent of men who CAN'T meet that bar is actually more about the job market and the housing market than the dating market.
So, for your big point, and here I'll do exactly what you're asking and respond to you personally:
I am not saying self-improvement is bad, nor that it won't increase your odds of success, I am saying that it is insufficient to deal with social decline, which is manifested in this issue and the others that I mention.
I couldn't disagree more. It's necessary to deal with social decline.
Draw back. What is a society if not the totality and product of its constituents? What is the quality of a society if not the quality of its constituents? What could cause a society to decline if not a decline in the quality of its material?
When you talk about societal decline, you say:
Yes individuals did great things, but they were only able to do those things because of the presence of continually enforced social norms surrounding gender roles and expectations. The farmer and factory worker of the 1880s worked hard to provide for his family. We were able to win the civil war and the first and second world wars because we had competent social systems (at the family level and beyond) that have since vanished.
We're not talking specifics here, so I don't know how much I agree with you on the details, but what you're describing here is coherent. So: how were these social norms continually enforced? Was it done by God, by the laws of nature, or by the individual members of American communities on the back of their own character? When we talk about competent social systems, aren't we talking about the competence of these old Americans? You say: "The system is broken and pretending that individual actions can fix it is, frankly, delusional." OK, then who's supposed to fix it? "Us" "communally?" Come on, we all know how value-props that start as "we should really..." wind up going. "We" means "nobody," unless there's someone in the room who hears "we" and thinks "me."
That kind of thinking is, very specifically, the poison in America right now. It's the thought that you, personally do not have responsibility to fix a given problem, that it doesn't rest on your shoulders, that it's communal guilt. Say what you like about Christ, but he was big on personal guilt, that it's not enough to say that everyone else is doing it, that you personally must repent and uphold standards. He was even willing to make that his own cross to bear. He took on our sins, and died for them. Our Lord took on our communal guilt - so we could no longer have the excuse.
At my current stage in life, the biggest thing on my mind is my family. In particular, it's the future of it. My parents were not especially good at keeping the fabric of the family together. I love them dearly, they have much to commend them, but that was not one of their strengths. I want to keep mine together. I want my children to have faith, to have me and my wife, to have their eventual spouses and children. I want them to have honor. I don't see any way for them to get this if I do not act faithfully and honorably. I don't see how they can be faithful and honorable to their friends or even to strangers if they can't be that way within their family. I don't see how their family can be that way if I am not that way. I don't expect these actions to magically change the entire world, but I do hope that they will change my family, and that we can be fruitful and multiply, that we can be a bedrock for our communities wherever they may be. And I believe that individuals making these decisions, over and over again individually, is what will create the new great American society.
Obviously I am still a poor sinner, no matter what I aspire to, you need no help picking that particular out. But I believe that the things I do matter for the people around me. My family is, right now, living in a better society than it was when I was a feckless adolescent because of the actions I have taken. It is a small society, but it is theirs, and I am proud of what I've done for them, no matter how small. That is what I believe in.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
19hr ago
Well, we're getting to the root of your dating problems at least. "Ah, where have all the virgin 25 year old 130 lbs women who have more interesting hobbies than just Netflix gone..." You're doing the same thing as the women who say "yeah I have 20 options but I'm just not feeling any of them, you know?" It's the exact same thing.
but I'm sure that she won't ever be thinking about any of them or comparing your performance
It would be utterly bizarre if she didn't! How could you not compare! This is what humans do!
Basically we've discovered that you're not after "dating" (quite attainable), you're after "she has to be noticeably above average in most metrics, and I have to own her mind body and soul, there has to be no chance that she ever even thinks about a man other than me, lest I constantly be paranoid about cheating" (maybe not as attainable, unsurprising that you're having difficulties).
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
19hr ago
5 or fewer sex partners (‘bodies’). Under age 30.
Oh come on this is just getting silly now.
People have sex, and age. If that's a dealbreaker then you're basically just looking for an excuse to stay single at that point.
kky
20hr ago
I did. Everything I wrote was about what you wrote, starting from how you plucked a single word out of context as a launching point for your own hobbyhorse. I oppose that. It’s a sign that the real has been subsumed into the symbol. You know the “everything I see reminds me of her” meme? It’s like that, but with theory, and it’s poison to discourse. You would have written the same post if he’d cited minimum wage numbers.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
22hr ago
You don't actually know how to "git gud".
Ah, but I never said I did! All I said was two simple words: "git gud". You see the difference, yes?
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
22hr ago
Trump knows his audience better than most, but even he has trouble sometimes.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
5hr ago
God is inherently interesting and doesn't need us to make Him anything. Eventually more and more people will be broken by the dopamine treadmill and will come back to God, as I have. Happens every day.
It may not necessarily happen immediately, I'd imagine this will play out over a large time scale as it often does. But the wages of sin are death, especially on a societal scale.
Do you think that the school does that in 12 + 4 years? The sciences need comparatively few things to really grok to be able to figure out everything else. Physics is 3 pages of formulas, inorganic chemistry is 2, math and geometry ditto (honestly you shouldn't bother remembering theorems - you should be able to quickly prove them on the spot when needed). I was able to read and write at age of 5 - and i was hardly among the most gifted. To know programming you only need to understand recursion, pointers, boolean algebra, hash tables, monads and O(n). That takes an afternoon. I think you really overestimate how much does it take to be mediocre at something - and mediocrity is what schools aims for. And kids are pretty good at investing in stuff that really interests them and becoming gods. Check games.
When people were having problems with integrals in Math 101 in college - I was just explaining to them - it is just the area of a function. Guess what - they understood it in 15 min.
Literature - change the books that are studied and kids will read them and fast.
The school is a combination of daycare and job program. This is why it is so inefficient.
For some reason unknown modern society severely underestimates kids intellect and overestimates their wisdom.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
19hr ago
Anyway, my bigger concern in the US is actually having a healthcare crisis with my child and becoming destitute,
How do you envision that happening?
Yeah I'm not happy about the damage these people are doing to my country.
More options
Context Copy link