domain:worksinprogress.co
zeke5123a
7m ago
The saga era Iceland didn’t really have a sovereign and it wasn’t super dystopian for the era
RegularlyExpressed
8m ago
black men gain more in status being American outside of America than other groups.
I would have thought typical social attitudes prevalent in the sorts of places passport bros target, like SEA, would be sufficiently unkind towards black people to counteract this relative status increase.
ThenElection
11m ago
To the extent we pay attention to man vs bear (which, it seems, will be with us for the foreseeable future), the relevant thing isn't the statistics of attacks or even that women fear men. It's that pretty much everyone seems to be taking the approach that at least one of the man or bear is a major threat.
The reality is that neither is particularly dangerous. So many takes seem to be something like "one will eat me alive, and the other will abduct and torture me for months before killing me," with slightly varying structure depending on the point the speaker is making. But getting in a car wreck on the way to the park or dying of exposure are both more likely causes of death than encountering either a random bear or a random man. And neither cars nor exposure are likely to kill you either. Use appropriate caution wherever you are, and you'll almost certainly be fine.
The hysterical neuroticism involved in the entire exercise on both sides is just a symptom of expressing feelings becoming the dominant political mode thanks to social media. Which can barely be called politics; it's more fashion and gossip than anything else.
Tanista
15m ago
Another reason is that the manosphere is closely associated with other rightwing internet subcultures where white nationalism is frequently celebrated
In my more "woke" lurking days it was hilarious to see the tensions here. A common refrain was AWALT - all women are like that. It's just the science bro. But when the WN/HBDers started applying the same judgment to blacks, TRPers had to scramble for some reason it didn't apply to them or their comrades in arms.
It’s interesting that passport bros tend to be black because, theoretically, black men should have an advantage in the dating market. Black men, due to higher muscularity, higher extroversion, and other “traits”, are viewed as the most masculine of the races. This bears out in interracial dating statistics where BMWF couples (excuse the porn-inspired abbreviation—it’s just efficient and I don’t feel like reinventing the wheel here) are well over-represented compared to WMBF couples who are under-represented. And this is not even accounting for the fact that if, instead of looking at stable couples, you look at people’s most recent sexual encounter, the disparity grows even further.
I have a simpler theory for why black men do better than black women.. This doesn't run into the problem faced above: "higher muscularity" as an unalloyed good requires not knowing a lot about the US and how groups are perceived.
I'm not going to get into the distribution of passport bros by race (I come from a country where this is so bad old white women are in on it, whites have sheer mass going for them). But, granting for the sake of argument, it seems like there's a simple explanation here too: black men gain more in status being American outside of America than other groups.
2D3D
18m ago
paid parasocial entertainment isn't really a thing in the western world,
Superior western capitalism has commodified thottery into cashapp and snaps. Parasocial relationships, without even needing to leave the house.
2D3D
20m ago
3 foot soldiers dead on national TV was enough to end BLM; how much worse for turbo-BLM in a free-fire zone?
BLM ended because the godzilla threshold for sending in the troops to quash rioters was breached. The riots could definitely have descended into haiti-level extortion rackets if the police never came in.
I don't doubt that cowardly looters would scatter at the first few dead, and reprisal raids conducted by amateurs are easily defended as you state. However defense of territory is never easy with multiple entry vectors, and territory can never be held in anarchic situations. A regression to defensible strongpoints with the rest being grey zones is the likely path for any conflict state with insufficient bodies and weapons to wage permanent war.
RegularlyExpressed
29m ago
Anecdotally, I did my Masters in Machine Learning, and I think I only knew of him because my brother used to like some of his LessWrong stuff.
Hyperion
33m ago
So stop with the pretense and give me the real thing. Give me actual agency and consequence. Or commit to your singular vision for the story and write a book instead.
The point of the game is the game. Mario isn't about rescuing princess peach it's about platforming. The story is just window dressing for the mechanics. It's just complaining that the game chess doesn't have a canon ending.
To clarify, I didn't mean to suggest that Ireland is especially anti-woke, rather that my sense is that the reach of progressive politics in the country is similar to that of most other anglo nations, which mirrors what you say. Hence this wouldn't serve to explain the difference in intensity of anti-Israel feelings between Ireland and say Australia. Of course, you've given the historical argument, and I suppose I was curious whether @2rafa would have appended something covering this to her list of factors predicting anti-Israel attitudes or whether she'd have a differing position.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
36m ago
I’m quite fond of my Lee-Enfield and stocked up on ammo for it.
Agreed that it is not the cartridge of choice for most Americans. Much easier to stumble on grandpa’s old boxes of .30-06!
fartVader
40m ago
Exactly zero.
The current AI work was inspired by nerds who loved imaging, linguistics, math and gpus.
faceh
43m ago
Black men, due to higher muscularity, higher extroversion, and other “traits”, are viewed as the most masculine of the races.
...balanced out, mind you, by higher rates of obesity, lower educational attainment (manosphere takes it as a given that women won't seriously date someone who doesn't have equal or greater credentials than she), more of them in prison (i.e. out of the dating pool) and of course less wealth in general.
And this is only to lead into my point about "Passport Bros" in general. The literal main thing they have going for them in the foreign dating market is the ability to offer a quick path to American Citizenship.
That's it. Beyond anything else, they are a golden ticket to getting established in the States.
So for black males in particular, who would struggle otherwise with competing for a high quality mate, they are on an much more equal playing field when the only question is how quickly they can transplant the new lady to the states and marry her so she can move along towards citizenship.
Now, I don't think this explains the full phenomenon, but I've seen enough foreign wives using marriage to an American male as a fulcrum to gaining citizenship (and, if the husband is particularly old, getting access to his wealth when he dies) that I have no illusions about what ACTUALLY attracts foreign women to American males.
ArmedTooHeavily
46m ago
I think that technocapital has already selected for "inhuman" traits in some populations (though I do think calling it "inhuman" is maybe not the most descriptive, because traits that humans have are definitionally human traits). These traits are the ones that make people more effective as components in the civilizational machine, the populations are the more heavily historically "civilized" ones, and there is a lot of crossover with the cultural traits identified as the "aspects and assumptions of whiteness and white culture" in the infamous smithsonian infographic (https://www.newsweek.com/smithsonian-race-guidelines-rational-thinking-hard-work-are-white-values-1518333#slideshow/1610610).
Individuality, neuroticism, self-reliance, "protestant" work ethic, respect for rules, avoidance of overt conflict, objective/linear thinking, etc are all traits that are unusual in pre-civilizational humans and that make for better members of civilization, and I think that technocapital has selected for those traits in humans both biologically and memetically/culturally.
All of this to say, it's not "What if it changes human nature?", that ship has sailed. The question is "What's anyone doing to take technocapital out of the driver's seat?", and the answer is "pretty much nothing, Kaczynski and Land are right, we are not our own masters, and it's acceleration from here on out."
2D3D
53m ago
You can shove any number of ugly 'women' there as you want, you can't force men to select them and a joint that does so simply ceases to make money. The selecting entity in this case is the mamasan curating her stable, not some admin forcing a DEI hire in.
Folamh3
56m ago
For what it's worth I disagree that Ireland isn't "particularly woke". I mean, the general population finds wokeness bizarre and alienating, but that's true of every country in which wokeness has found any kind of purchase: it's an ideology by and for the elites, and for the most part the elites in Ireland are just as woke as in any other Anglophone nation. We have self-ID (and the attendant rows about males in women's prisons and sports); controversies over youth gender medicine; massive BLM protests in 2020; the incidence of words like "racism", "transphobia", "homophobia" etc. in our two national newspapers has skyrocketed since 2010 and demands for draconian hate speech legislation - in short, everything you'd expect from a woke nation. The point I was trying to make is that Irish support for the Palestinian cause predates Ireland's great awokening by decades, and pro-Palestine marches were a common sight to see long before anyone here had heard of a preferred pronoun.
I also think @2rafa is being a bit sweeping by putting a slash between leftist and woke. Many wokes are liberals, many leftists are not wokes, although they do both tend to favour the Palestinian cause if for different reasons.
It is the best fighting rifle under the technological constraints of the era (ignoring the P14/P17, but those are just iterative improvements on Rifle No. 1; Rifle No. 4 had to compete with "just make semi-autos lol" and isn't in my mind as special).
They already had the high-speed operator thing figured out, and you can tell; cock on close, 10 rounds in the mag, and the safety that you can "slingshot" off of Safe when the rifle is cocked (which is an interesting touch I've never seen anyone mention). It's truly unfortunate that a fighting bolt-action rifle was never iterated on meaningfully beyond this- I would have expected one design just to try and keep that niche alive but nope, nothing but slow-fire high-accuracy (which was the only niche that remained for the action type).
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