domain:firsttoilthenthegrave.substack.com
This part:
This is exactly why we have the rule,
Post about specific groups, not general groups, wherever possible.
Is ridiculously selectively applied, e.g. basically any time people use "the establishment" as a foil they're guilty of this, but they don't get modhatted. As it stands, the rule is merely another cudgel to use against people making left-leaning arguments, although in this case I don't think an unbiased application of this rule would be particularly good either. It just makes it clunky to talk about subsets of a group that believe in specific ideas that might not be shared among the whole group.
Though I do agree the "I expect that RandomRanger will withdraw his claim" is fairly presumptuous here.
If AOC says something and isn't broadly getting a lot of pushback from her party, that would be quite indicative that at least a major fraction of the left believed something, or at least doesn't disagree with her. This is not weakmanning.
The extremely dangerous men of special forces military units have no desire to signal their extreme dangerousness to the general public when they're out for some drinks with the boys. If anything, these guys are less likely to get into stupid fights for no real reason than the average guy because of their ability to easily keep their cool in stressful situations.
Why do you think it makes sense to say that the views of some random politician are emblematic of the "online racialist Right"?
She's a member of the United States Cabinet!
Lotta people have gotten used to being out of power. Now that Trump is President they're forced to either defend the administration they supported and voted for or criticize their own side, and they don't want to do either.
So let me get this straight: he's covered literally to his head in tattoos, he sells drugs, he's a drunk and a junkie, he's violent with the criminal conviction to back that up, and he just straight-up violently murdered a guy with a samurai sword over a disputed drug debt. But he's such a loving partner and father!
The contradiction is not as irresolvable as it may, at first glimpse, appear; it is far more common than one would assume that someone will be benevolent to their family or close associates, while displaying unbounded cruelty to those they have convinced themselves deserve it.
This cuts across distinctions of personal appearance; the same pattern, with substitution of variables, describes the Nazi concentration-camp guard ('he's a sub-human weakening the Aryan¹ Race'), the Soviet gulag guard ('he's a wrecker trying to derail the Revolution on behalf of the capitalists'), the United-Statesian ICE agent ('he came into our country rather than obey our command that he quietly starve or be murdered in his place of birth'), the person of hair colour and pronouns in the cancel-mob ('he's a cishet-white-male schistlord who used a term² on the naughty-no-no-word list') and the seller of disfavoured substances ('he didn't pay me the money he owed me, thus violating the Non-Aggression Principle').
Focus less on "Which personal aesthetics mean that this person is or isn't safe to associate with?" (cf. Goodhart) and more on the Parable of the Good Samaritan³, as interpreted by Fred Clark. (Patheos, April 2017)
¹...despite him being of Romani origin, and thus more Aryan than the Germans.
²...which was actually the preferred nomenclature five years ago.
³If Jesus were telling the story today, would it be the Good Palestinian?
My late grandmothers position on tattoos was that the only respectable people who had them were concentration camp survivors.
don't know why some women are so stupid
Society shelters them too much. Women are raised as 'sweet princesses'. Men are dropped into the deep end and expected to figure it out. This has always been true, but now women can vote. With great power comes great responsibility.
It's not just women. It's a rift between idealists and pragmatists. Let idealists wield soft power. Men of the arts & academia. Idealists shape culture. John Lennon imagines. But hard power should be left to the pragmatists.
This thread is full of people saying that tattoos aren't attractive.
Not quite.
Its more that they're correlated with low social status in the larger scheme. This doesn't mean they isn't a local maxima where they make someone more attractive than they would otherwise be, even if it also makes them vastly less attractive to a certain segment of the population.
In fact, I've said it straight up that the 'cheat code' to getting more women interested in you is get tattoos, get subversive piercings and buy a motorcycle. This can lead to other negative effects, but the tradeoffs may be worth it! At least in the short term.
There's a dearth of people who hold positions of true wealth power who have tattoos, though. Thus, they remain a reliable class signifier.
When something is largely a lower-class phenomenon, just like enjoying MMA or light beer, the fact that a few upper class folks indulge doesn't really prove otherwise.
yet every cop and every Navy SEAL and every BJJ champ and every boxer I know has at least one tattoo visible in short sleeves.
Yes, which might explain why people who AREN'T tough want to mimic a signal that makes them seem tough, whether they are or are not. That's common enough in nature.
And if they do so, that degrades the strength of the signal. And makes counter-signalling more viable. If all the cops, SEALs and BJJ guys have tattoos, what might you surmise about the ones that have resisted the trend and don't have any?
I dunno, it reads like a social trend like any other. I lived through the era of tramp stamps, and those faded from popularity. I've seen dozens of fashion trends come and go. The only trick with tattoos is they're more costly to alter or remove.
Also, add in that there is researching indicating they can lead to health issues.
It may be more relevant than I thought! Guy with scraggly beard and hair like a bird's nest versus guy who at least trims his beard and washes his hair: who looks like trouble you'd want to avoid and who looks at least semi-respectable?
One tattoo on its own is not an indicator of trashiness, but the thing is: some people can stop at one tattoo. Some people, on the other hand, seem to go "just one more. One more. One more" until they're covered in them. This guy is described as a tattoo artist which may be the excuse he gives for 'what do you do for a living?' or it may just be a self-description: "ah yeah, I make my money from doing tattoos for people, not from drug dealing".
I have to come out and admit I'm prejudiced. Not just because I think a lot of tattoos looks trashy, but also because a partner of a family member was something I moved from being neutral about, to disliking, to writing them off as a manipulative shit head. And funnily enough, they got a tattoo later in life, then went the "just one more" route, then shaved their head, then moved on to full-blown "being a manipulative shit head". So my priors on people with tattoos may well be contaminated 😁
I think guys like this one aren't particularly benevolent to their families, they just haven't turned on them yet.
The allegation is that he and the victim were friends, and that's likely; the victim was buying drugs off him, after all. But when your friend is your dealer, he's not your friend anymore.
This is also dragging in another one of my hobbyhorses: "whaaat's the haaarm in a few druuuugs, bitta fun, should be legaaaal". Well, maybe legal drugs in this instance would indeed have kept the man from getting killed by the paranoid, possibly high, 'friend' who was claiming he owed a huge drug debt.
But the problem is the 'friend'. A junkie who was doing some minor dealing, probably dipping into his own supply, probably being leaned on by his suppliers (who are not nice people who think drugs are wonderful and everyone should have free access to them so we'll supply them) for the missing money, getting paranoid and trying in turn to lean on his customers with claims that they owed more money than they did. This was not somebody doing 'few druuuugs, bitta fuuuuun'. Drugs and guys like this don't mix well (neither does alcohol, I'll freely admit that). The drugs legalisers seem to push the idea that drugs are just harmless party fun and if legal nobody would ever have any bad outcomes.
Yeah, I don't think so.
Quite apart from the fact that this guy is plainly psycho enough/stupid enough that he can't figure out "don't walk into court on a serious charge grinning like it's a day out at the beach" in all the photos taken of him.
Digital fast update, Peter and Paul edition.
- Your Name, +2. A feature-length anime about a city boy and a country girl swapping bodies that takes an unexpected turn when they decide to meet. It's one of the best-drawn 2D movies I've ever seen and even some 3D-assisted total animation they used doesn't look jarring. As far as I know, the director deliberately wanted to avoid making "another anime" and wanted this to be treated as a work that is judged on its own, not because it has round eyes and too few FPS. He made a couple more feature films after this one that I plan to watch, but I can't be assed to find proper ass subs that overlay carefully styled text over signs and phones and newspapers and do other fancy stuff like that.
- Master and Commander: the Far Side of the World, 0. If you have a hardon for the Royal Navy, like Catgirl Kulak, then watch it. Volokolamskoye Shosse is probably a better book about military leadership. The ship scenes look great, but the plot feels more like a series of vignettes than a coherent story. And Russell Crowe is fat.
- Breaking Bad, rating pending. I still haven't finished watching it. It will most likely get a +2 from me, but I want to finish season five before rating it properly.
- One Punch Man, 0. I almost gave it a -1 after watching the first few series, but then it finally realized it needed at least some plot. It's still nothing more than The Adventures of Dr. McNinja with Japanese characteristics, which makes sense, given than it started as a webcomic as well.
I don't get your point about "the establishment" in this particular context. Why does it matter if they have power (real or perceived) in regards to whether it's a specific or general group. Most people, even politicians, don't see themselves as "establishment". For some people, Trump as POTUS is the epitome of "establishment". For others, calling him that word is utterly ludicrous. Note that I personally think it's fine for people to attack "the establishment" -- I'm opposed to this rule in general.
And I'm not defending his post wholesale -- I agree the last bit is presumptuous and I'm fine with him being given a warning for something like that. I don't think throwing the gauntlet to someone like this is really that bad, but maybe I'm in the minority on that. I think personal attacks are far worse for productive conversations, which happen regularly and don't get punished (or even become AAQCs!) as long as it's someone with a right-wing opinion attacking someone with a left-wing opinion.
I also have some reservations with how it seems like a final warning from stuff like his previous post which didn't deserve a mod action at all.
All you have done is clearly demonstrate that you have already made up your mind and no matter what hoops people jump through will not be sufficient.
first you lie
you would not bother to engage with and would dismiss it all out of hand
All you have done is make me update towards you also being a net-negative.
Yeesh, no thanks.
Yes, but drill it in a little deeper, the demonstrated ability to wreak havoc on your enemies is catnip for women since in the ancestral environment that was a major signal for genetic fitness, that you would produce strong children and could protect them to adulthood.
That's why I don't quite think that its a failure of risk-aversion (I mean, after the first time he hits her, sure), since on an evolutionary level, there'd be a larger risk to pairing with a guy who was physically incapable of defending you.
But it is bonkers that once they feel attraction the prefrontal cortex isn't able to project the longer term consequences of pursuing the guy. Not just that he might beat her, but that he's got no real prospects for building wealth or raising a family in a stable environment. This is so fucking primal that you see fashion Heiresses getting knocked up by sexy felons and a literal Rothschild leaving her husband to date a rapper.
And yeah, there are counter stories about wealthy men blowing up their lives and leaving faithful women to pursue or marry a stripper or even literal prostitute. No doubt. But far as I can tell that's never socially celebrated or sanctioned or really excused.
I think about this video constantly ever since I first saw it.
The stated admission (that I do not think is a joke!) that even a literal villain who slaughtered her people can instantly win her over by... pointing a sword at her throat.
I didn't expect a banana to give me trypophobia today. Out of a desire to upgrade my diet from becoming 100% junk food to merely 90%, I bought a bunch of them.
They arrived at a non-ideal level of ripeness, and then I let them sit for a few days. Now they're nice and yellow, but have a pattern of spots on them makes my skin crawl. Just about the only image on earth that otherwise does that is a photoshopped pic of someone's tits with holes added on, purportedly from worms.
A lot of those jobs being unusually terrible is historically contingent. Being jobs at all is historically contingent.
Much has been said about how low status it is to be a stay at home wife lately, but these are often the jobs being taken. It's nice and high status to have a Mexican maid clean one's house, hire a Guatemalan landscaper, get cheap ethnic take out, to just buy new clothing whenever there's a tear, and that all chickens come pre-plucked and gutted. Gardening, cooking, picking berries, and sewing are not necessarily good candidates for industrialization. Mass produced strawberries and chicken was probably a mistake.
Also, bras are a terrible undergarment for fat women. Bring back the chemise and stays.
In this case it seems particularly evident that the issue with drugs that trick you into not feeling hunger at your normal rate is that it becomes that much harder to operate normally without them.
You simply regain your appetite, and around half the weight back in a year if you stop Ozempic. I don't see how that's not strictly better than not taking it.
Unlike OP, I think a world where people can only solve their problems by becoming addicted to complex and expensive drugs is a bad one.
The hell is a "complex" drug? Does it have a hard to pronounce name? Does it have a large molecular weight? Does it act on more than one signaling pathway?
Ozempic isn't particularly expensive. Most middle class people in the West can afford it, if it's not covered by insurance. There are legal or grey market sources that are significantly cheaper. And as more alternatives arise, including generics, it'll only get cheaper.
Gym memberships cost money too.
And Ozempic isn't "addictive". Do people not know what that word means?
Is insulin addictive to a diabetic, because they'd fall sick or even die if they stopped?
Weening yourself off of the drug should be the ultimate goal, otherwise you're just embracing a different kind of slavery.
I would like to see you wean yourself off oxygen and water. Perhaps, to be less challenging or immediately lethal, clothing or shelter. Otherwise what are you but a slave to biological necessity?
This is all such immensely confused thinking that I don't know how such beliefs can even arised. At the very least, it is factually incorrect.
Back to my main point: people covered in tattoos and/or piercings are the human equivalent of aposematism, change my mind.
It depends a lot on the coverage and the gender and stature of the person in question, I would say.
But for a big dude who gives off danger vibes, tattoos seem to serve to enhance that vibe -- especially clearly visible tattoos, like on hands or head, which signal I do not have or plan to ever have a job where looking respectable is required.
Depending on the local culture, I suppose that investing in that level of signaling might reek a bit of desperation. The ex special forces guy probably will not get a face tattoo so the locals take him serious, while a youth with aspirations towards becoming a violent criminal might. Of course, as a non-fighter, I recognize that I am much more likely to be stabbed by some fuckwit youth who is playing the tough guy than by an experienced fighter who has managed to avoid a life sentence so far.
Does that make your guts come out? I would hope not! Without looking it up, I believe it's a rather superficial, if widespread, infection.
(You're Japanese, so I apologize for raising the specter of radiation poisoning in your presence.)
Problem is, yes I would lose weight if you locked me in a camp and beat me with sticks. But to keep the weight off, you'd have to keep me locked up for life, or give me my own personal 'beat me with sticks and knock the food out of my hands' 24/7 person.
Changing habits is hard and willpower won't let me power my way to the new regime. I managed to willpower my way to stop biting my nails after years and years of that, but I can't willpower 'just stop fucking eating, you fat bitch'.
So, in this sentence, what is the "problem" that is in need of a solution? Is it, like, "the problem of trying to decide what to tell people"? Or what?
The kind of adoption process that involves traveling the world to find the perfect orphan is straight-up child buying, and has some moral similarities to eugenic embryo modification.
You say that like it's a bad thing. I consider both of them to be fine, not that I'm looking to adopt, or at the very least "not my business".
They do not speak for the "woke right" (which itself is just a snarl term).
What is your preferred term to describe the type of people that James Lindsay characterizes as "woke right"? I don't like the term either, but there is a generally identifiable group of people who @TheAntipopulist labelled "racialist Right" who are pretty much the same people Lindsay labels "woke right".
Then consider Japan, which only employs 50k migrants in its agricultural and forestry sector.
People who have the option to be laborers in cities will prefer that to being agricultural laborers
And if there is an absence of agricultural workers, the wages for agriculture go up, meaning the conditions become as desirable as WWOOFing, meaning people return to work in agriculture.
Why am I (and others of an older generation) so horribly prejudiced against perfectly normal people covered head-to-toe in tattoos and piercings? Why do we cling to our outmoded beliefs that tattooing of that extent reveals low-life trashiness?
Well, cases like this, for one. Add in drugs (but of course drugs were involved) and it's a mess. Why, how can I look at the photos of this productive member of society and think to myself "that's a crazy dangerous person?"
Because he is a crazy dangerous person.
Also, while I'm at it, let me give out about the members of my own sex who hook up with crazy dangerous guys and still persuade themselves that this is the human equivalent of a velvet hippo cuddlebug pitbull who won't ever bite their own face off:
So let me get this straight: he's covered literally to his head in tattoos, he sells drugs, he's a drunk and a junkie, he's violent with the criminal conviction to back that up, and he just straight-up violently murdered a guy with a samurai sword over a disputed drug debt. But he's such a loving partner and father!
I honestly don't know why some women are so stupid. Yeah, loving and devoted up to the minute he swings at you with a sword, you silly girl.
Back to my main point: people covered in tattoos and/or piercings are the human equivalent of aposematism, change my mind.
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