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Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
11m ago
This seems like the inverse of reality. With football or basketball, so much is happening so often that the odds of me missing something very cool (an athletic dunk, a field-flipping interception, a clutch three-point shot from a mile away, a nifty trick play) is astronomically higher per minute I’m away than with soccer.
Even if something exciting does happen in a soccer game, it often takes several minutes to develop (i.e. even after intercepting a pass, a player has to actually make it all the way upfield and usually wait for some team support before attempting to score, giving me plenty of time to get out of the bathroom before missing the best part) and frankly isn’t usually all that visually appealing even when it does finally happen. I would say the average soccer match includes maybe five or six interesting moments. An average basketball game includes like twenty.
That depends a lot of what you mean by "said". We communicated online for quite a while before we met physically, and even longer before we decided that we belong together. Of course, it was the time before Twitter, when people actually had conversations online :)
I am not implying the advice is given with bad intent - just that one must be careful that it may not apply to everyone, and if it doesn't work for somebody, it doesn't mean they are even more of a loser than they thought - but that there are other ways that would be better for them. Like, for example, find communities online where once could practice talking with various people. Maybe even with people of female persuasion without trying to score with them ;) It doesn't mean never talking to meatspace people - just maybe not jump right into that if that's not what you're comfortable doing.
JarJarJedi
18m ago
If it's about money, how about staying in the house and getting housemates? (I assume the house if big enough for that - I don't know DFW market but $380k sounds like it should buy some decent space?) Once you marry and ready to start that adventure in a new house, you can sell this one, or keep renting it out - by then you'd know if it works for you.
100ProofTollBooth
24m ago
What was the first thing you said to your wife?
"I don't think your advice will work for me," Is a valid thing to say. I offered my best possible advice with genuine intent.
JarJarJedi
24m ago
There's an obvious flaw in this model. If all you need is a shag, why pay the middle-man? If what you need is long-term, how do you expect to sustain it once Cyrano is out of the picture? Of course, if you're just bad at passing the initial nutcase filters, it could help, but the prerequisite would still be to be able to survive the first date in person.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
31m ago
If US intelligence was most focused on strengthening America's stability, wouldn't they try to shore up American identity? Wouldn't they want colorblind patriotism, the supporting the troops ethos? You want to smooth over divisions, you don't want to create even controlled conflicts. You'd try to subvert and suppress dangerous groups of course but you wouldn't try to suppress the majority's white identity, you try to annex it into American identity.
Look at what Russia does. Rally around the flag, enemies all around us, we're all Russians regardless of race/creed, sacred duty to the motherland... They suppress the liberal/trans/separatist minority rather than the majority.
Here's an interesting article that perhaps deserves a post of its own. There are many things to say about it ("Gorbachev and Yeltsin ruined ice cream, the cowards.") but you get the sense that the state machinery is trying to keep the country together, promoting unity rather than division: https://harpers.org/archive/2024/01/behind-the-new-iron-curtain/
That's not what the US is doing. They're playing the patronage/suppression game, not the national unity game. 'We need more blacks in the Air Force, quotas everywhere, need to fight white supremacy and racism'. Those Stand Down days in the US military to counter extremism, internal conflict over things like migration and national identity.
JarJarJedi
36m ago
Start by making short observations at checkout lines.
I am an introvert. Note, I am happily married and do not need any dating advice, but this one sounds to be a bit like: "want to get strong? It's easy - start with bench pressing 300lbs and then do it every other day for 6 months and you'd be golden". I'm sure for some people that sounds like a reasonable advice, to me it looks so remote from my world and my character as a proposal to take a nice quick walk to the moon. I suspect it'd sound the same to many other introverts. My problem with it is not that it might not work - some people do bench 300lbs, so it might work for them - but that you make it sound like it's trivial for every normal person to do it, so when a person for whom it is not trivial reads this, they would only think it's because they are some kind of special extra-hard strength loser that go below even normal definition of loser. And that's just not the case.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
37m ago
Except for a few long shots and obviously composited shots, it didn’t trip my uncanny valley sensors. I thought most of the close-up work looked practical, possibly with ape suits with green faces. I’ll look forward to a Making Of, because it honestly looked like real talking apes for most of it, and I stopped caring about a tenth of the way through.
The story and drama was, for me, as much worth it as the spectacle. The idea of what makes a civilization runs through the entire film, more than any previous entry in the series. Any lingering questions I had about the setting, by the end were answered in spades.
Quantumfreakonomics
40m ago
Still on Human Action.
Given how much I like Austrian Economics, I figured I should actually read(listen to the audiobook of) this.
The entirety of the first 90 minutes was spent belaboring the same two or three points about human nature. Yeah, these points are foundational to the entire discipline, and some core insights are genius, but I stand my my take that SBF was right about books.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
40m ago
The approach that I've seen posted on /g/ is to use the "PLUSNIGGER license", which consists of adding to the license a clause stating that the word "nigger" must always be included.
100ProofTollBooth
42m ago
I'm reading Hesse's Steppenwolfe right now and it strikes me as the self-aware version of Underground quite a bit. Not finished yet, so it could change.
It's fun reading Underground at different points in your life. The extent to which I sympathized with the protagonist as I douchey college type is now pure chuckle-memory to my now Based Giga-Chad self. Ah fuck I see what I did there.
hydroacetylene
44m ago
Fellow DFWite- you should rent it out. The DFW real estate market is absolutely brutal to transition from renting to owning in; I’m assuming this is a northwest Dallas location in Dallas ISD based on what you told me, which means your home should increase in value a lot if you hold on to it, giving you a massive head start when you and your future wife buy your forever home. A good property management company is a must, but your house is unlikely to sit vacant.
I’m not sure why you’re moving into an apartment when rents are absolutely insane right now. I will also caution you that the fun part of town(if you’re young I assume this is deep Ellum or maybe uptown) is much less fun to actually live in. I would advise you that living in your house is the best move, renting it out while living elsewhere is a distant second, and selling is a bad idea unless you’re moving out of town or buying another house immediately.
100ProofTollBooth
47m ago
I am a loser
What makes you say this? I'm not trying to give you an internet pump-up speech along the lines of "you're probably pretty great!"
No, I will accept at face value that you fucking suck, loser. Now, let's identify the problem.
Are you short and skinny? Do you smell and dress bad? You say you have a fair bit of money. Did you earn it or did someone die an leave it to you?
The point is that getting out of loserdom is really just a project like anything else. Identify what is lacking, create plans for compounding improvement, execute those plans, track and log progress, adjust along the way.
Here's a generalize bullet list that 99% of dudes benefit from:
-
I'm a physical loser ---> Go to the gym. There are a million beginner lifting routines. Do one. After six months, add a competitive sport. Doesn't have to be MMA / BJJ, just something where there is a definite winner and loser and people take it seriously. Don't do beer league softball.
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I'm a social loser ---> Get good at small talk. Start by making short observations at checkout lines. Try to make simple jokes. If it goes poorly, you're in a checkout line and the interaction will end in literally seconds. You'll know you're getting good when it becomes almost second nature and you can get a chuckle most of the time. Next step, start going to bars and doing this with the bartender (doesn't matter if they're male or female). Most of their day is spent making small talk to medium talk (i.e. bullshitting with regulars about their jobs or whatever). They're pretty much on autopilot and also paid to be nice, so they'll help the conversation along even if you still kind of suck. This will help you get better at developing a few quick "lines" into full on conversations. An option but not really recommended step is to do this at strip clubs. Again, I don't recommend it but have great stories. I digress.
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I'm a loser loser, meaning I have no confidence in myself ---> Paradoxically, one of the easier ones to solve. Confidence comes from exactly one process; demonstrate competence in a difficult task. You will pick a medium term task or project that seems hard, and then you will do it. Build a website, build a birdhouse, organize a party, train for an complete a 10k, something that takes around 90 days. Pick it. Do it. Write about it as you are doing it in a journal style. At the end, after you do it, read the journal, relive the emotional journey and realize "I did it even though it was hard along the way." Boom, confidence.
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I'm an internet loser. This is guy code for "I watch porn." It's easy - stop.
JarJarJedi
55m ago
Since as it seems virtually nobody cares for both Russians' privatized victory day and their shenanigans on that day - at least the mentions of it in Western press seem to be rather scarce - then paying attention to whether or not they successfully performed those shenanigans would also be counter-productive. In this particular matter, ignoring them seems to be the best course of action. Of course, declaring the new large weapons shipment to Ukraine would be a better reaction, but that seems to be beyond hope now.
100ProofTollBooth
59m ago
akin to the cybersecurity or military strategy
"Defense in Depth" means something very different in the cyber versus the traditional military context.
It's a real shame that the term was re-used but then also redefined. So, unfortunately, I think your analysis is confused and self-contradictory not because of a failure of your personal construction, but because the terms and the concepts underlying them can't be swapped out as easily as you may have assumed.
Directly answering your intro question - hard no. Conspiracy theories about the all-powerfulness of the amorphous "intel" cabal of the USA I always dismiss out of hand because the axiomatic assumption underpinning it is that they're all powerful. "Could an all powerful entity do ... stuff!?" Yes, yes it could.
The sad fact of the matter is that the really cooky progressive stuff is the result of a Long March through the institutions paired with the kind of narcissism that can only result from the most prosperous generation of all time (boomers) failing to introduce their children (millennials) to reality. If you grow up richer than all other humans and never leave the suburban never-never land (even into college), tinker belle starts talking about polyamory, and then everyone starts calling your green tights gay, then, yeah, maybe cheering for the Islamic Death Cult helps you work through those emotions.
Phrased differently; social progressivism is make believe that has survived as a political ideology only briefly. Remember, 10 years ago we were in lame duck Obama years and looking at an at the time probable Bush-Clinton 2: Electric Boogaloo contest in 2016. Then the Orange rolled down the escalator and changed the game. 10 years in politics / social ideologies isn't nothing, but it isn't that long. The hard left is dying quickly before our eyes (big caveat here: the overton window has been shifted so much that the non-hard left is still pretty nuts.)
MAGA types are going to take multiple victory laps as the hard left continues to decline, but they've problems of their own. If the hard left is political make believe, the hard right is nihilistic fatalism. We had Walt Bismarck around these parts not too long along. Reading his substack is both worth it and difficult. Worth it in that a lot of his highlighted problems are very real and very well analyzed. Difficult because a lot of the solutions are heavily caveated "...but, even still, I don't think society is recoverable."
Looking in the mirror, earlier this week or last week, I got called out for unintentionally recommending a Benedict Option. That one made me think. Nihilism and fatalism aren't self-sustaining ideologies for obvious reasons. Worse, they don't actually cultivate pro-social and pro-growth behavior in a constituency. I saw a funny thing during the heart of the pandemic; my progressive friends were barricaded in doors wearing their CBRN costumes during zoom meetings - they mostly got a little fat, posted on Twitter more, and got good at home brewing anxiety. My MAGA friends stayed outside, went to spring break --- and got constantly shitfaced without a second thought. They definitely "owned the libs" at their end of the world party. And now, even those who think Trump: Deuces Wild is inevitably going to premier in November walk around very much like a doomsday cult that had their D-Day come and go without the rapture and are now feeling empty, fearful, and unprepared.
And none of this is the real threat to America.
Because that's China.
If so, it's their biggest failure ever; there's a serious possibility of civil war, and even if unrealised that threat is contributing to other threats such as a potential WWIII over Taiwan.
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