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There is a critical flaw with your advice.

The definition of luxury belief is beliefs you can afford to have. "Study your hobby and things will work out" is a luxury belief for exactly this reason, because you can get away with studying your hobby and things will work out for you in the end (if you have additional options to fall back on or money is not a concern at all). Why would you ever broadcast that you can't afford to have these luxury beliefs? What are you, poor?

The problem isn't that these beliefs are wrong, it's that America is the land of temporarily embarrassed millionaires. You see this all the time because it is a culture obsessed with broadcasting their success. Some woman wrote a book in coffee stores and made a billion dollars, why can't you do that? She proved it's possible! What are you, stupid? Kids see streamers their age making six figures a year. Why would you study hard when you can stick your face in front of a camera and make money for acting like a moron and playing video games! What are you, stupid?

What they don't see are all the failures. Failures are invisible. For every JK Rowling there's millions of writers, even published ones, who can't pay a power bill with book royalties. For every Mr Beast there's a thousand people humiliating themselves on Twitch for pennies in the name of Content.

Yeah. And sane as you, i submitted at the last minute. Probably could hace done better with more tine, but its hard to tell how much time i should sink into this pointless online mental masturbation.

Even after looking at that, I still don't understand what the drama is about. People are "running for the fire exits" and abandoning usage of a piece of software because the author wrote a tone-deaf letter? A well-drafted and professional communication disqualifies someone from running a birthday party? Every time I see info about this drama I feel like I understand it even less. No one seems to want to actually accuse anyone of anything, except being "insensitive." And I don't know what that means, that's such a broad term it could include repeated and personal bullying or saying an unpopular belief. And whenever specific conduct is discussed, it sounds more like indifference than malice to me.

I still have no idea what's going on and I'm continually bemused at people who make such an identity out of their software that they'd abandon such a useful concept because a major author isn't maximally on their side. As someone who understands why people like Nix but has never cared for evangelists talking about the tech of the future, I'm slightly bemused that this was apparently all it took for some people to abandon The Future Of Linux. I mean, I love Linux too guys, but can everyone just get a life?

I guess I am pretty short-termist: AI and a looming showdown in the Pacific may well decide the fate of the world soon. If everyone's pieces aren't developed soon, they might as well be taken off the board.

I just don't think Tate and Fuentes have such a big effect. Some groypers embarrassed some Turning Point USA event IIRC, that was Nick Fuente's claim to fame. But who are the key players, which are the most valuable pieces? Adults: policymakers, policy enforcers, officer corps, party cadres, elite businessmen, academics. They also have the power to beat down the youth, they can force you to put your pronouns on a badge or make you affirm your commitment to DEI. They can take your job prospects away if you support unapproved movements. Where is Tate right now? In jail. The way to achieve political change is to demoralize enemy elites and mobilize friendly elites, growing a power base, rewarding supporters with sinecures and power... Popular opinion is important but secondary to the key actors.

Furthermore, Tate and Fuentes aren't team players, they're bad pieces. Fuentes had this huge feud with BAP, I don't really know the details. That's not really productive from the point of view of the rightist world-spirit. Neither of them are prophet-tier activists like Muhammed, Hitler or even Trump. Trump's a deeply, deeply flawed prophet but he does have the power to rally armed men, he has serious pull with charisma alone.

These are important barriers on a timescale of a few years, but on the scale of decades, the march of biotech and basic research will overcome imo.

Antisemitism is definitely increasing in the US on the left and right. But I don’t see it becoming central to politics for a few reasons.

The first is that the last time there was major antisemitism in European countries (including the US) Jews were the most ‘visible minority’ with any political power. Blacks in the US had no political power and this was in any case before the majority of the great migration to the northern cities had occurred. Today whites are far more likely to have issues with other minorities than Jews.

The second issue is that the right and left approach antisemitism from completely different angles. As the speech you quoted from the AmRen conference down thread suggests, the problem the hard left has with Jews is that they’re too white, and that this quality is what makes Israel an ‘apartheid state’ and ‘white supremacist’. The problem the hard right has with Jews (if they have a problem with them) is that they’re not white enough, that they advocate against ‘white interests’, undermining European civilization from within.

These views are fundamentally opposed; black nationalists and white ones can agree on their contempt for Jews but will quickly disagree on what is owed to black people. Islamists and white nationalists can agree on hostility toward Jews but will quickly disagree on the status of brown and black migrants from Islamic countries in the West. And white nationalists and some far leftists may agree that some wealthy or influential Jews support progressive policies in America but ethnonationalist ones in Israel, but their desired resolutions to this hypocrisy are literally diametrically opposite to each other.

The only theory that makes sense is the argument, advanced in some white nationalist circles, that without the leadership and financial contributions of Jewish people the organized left and center-left would crumble. I don’t find this persuasive; progressivism in the West was a powerful force long before the large scale involvement of Jews in politics and many European countries with very few Jewish people involved in political life still have large, influential, gentile left-leaning political factions that also support all the stuff that angers reactionaries.


What’s the point of the weird opinion canvassing you do here? You’ve been banned like ten times for hmmposting as @sarker said yesterday. I don’t even mind your presence because I think you post some interesting discussion points, but I wish you’d be honest about why you’re doing it.

Yes, this fits my observations better as well.

  1. There are schools that don’t meet either of those definitions that matter (eg Chicago, Georgetown, Duke, Vandy, Northwestern).

  2. Good schools also matter to getting into professional school.

Fuentes is entertaining, funny at times, and has a social media army of teenagers. This can be influential in the same way that the 4chan --> Elon Musk pipeline was influential. Charisma is important (why Musk’s persona is more influential than Zuckerberg’s, why Trump won the presidency). Jared Taylor is too old and outside the current memeplex to affect culture now; maybe he is the most well-spoken person on the far right, but being well-spoken doesn’t really do much. Remember how influential Jon Stewart was? Stephen Colbert? These were dumb personas that made jokes but IMO were vastly more influential than their knowledge or raw intelligence should allow. Fuentes has 10 more years of being a “youth influence” (going by Asmongold’s age) and putting him back on Twitter is a way to grow his audience.

I disagree that Tucker is 10x more influential. IMO Tucker is more like 50x more influential.

We probably couldn't tell if the synthetic meat was bogus in some subtle way.

The potential for serious consequences that only show up a decade or two down the line is reason enough for me to foreswear this kind of technology until the research has been done. Maybe there's a manufacturing defect which means one in every ten-thousand pieces of meat has some fucked up prions in it - there are a bunch of ways serious issues could get through basic testing.

FWIW I’m grateful to you for these thoughtful responses each time.

I don’t think women entered the workforce en masse as a form of insurance against spousal abuse. I think it was to access a higher standard of living by having two incomes, and that husbands were active participants in encouraging this process.

When raggedyanthem was still active on the forum she liked to make the point that normally when the ‘become a stay at home mom’ question comes up, it’s usually the husband who’s opposed. This speaks to the main reasoning for the lack of stay at home moms being mostly economic factors, which men are typically more sensitive to, and not risk-based factors that women tend to be sensitive to. There’s probably external economic factors involved as well; taking the standard of living cut is simply easier when smaller houses and crappier cars exist as a thing that middle class people have access to, and the story of the past few decades in America has been steadily rendering those things more and more the domain of the poor.

I'm not familiar with that, and it sounds like Nestorianism to me. I have never heard hyperdulia applied to anything but the Mother of God.

Looking into the matter, I found Thomas Aquinas arguing the opposite, that Christ's flesh is offered latria on account of its unity with the Word, but also that it receives dulia on account of Christ's human perfection:

And so the adoration of Christ's humanity may be understood in two ways. First, so that the humanity is the thing adored: and thus to adore the flesh of Christ is nothing else than to adore the incarnate Word of God: just as to adore a King's robe is nothing else than to adore a robed King. And in this sense the adoration of Christ's humanity is the adoration of "latria." Secondly, the adoration of Christ's humanity may be taken as given by reason of its being perfected with every gift of grace. And so in this sense the adoration of Christ's humanity is the adoration not of "latria" but of "dulia."

He also adds, "So that one and the same Person of Christ is adored with "latria" on account of His Divinity, and with "dulia" on account of His perfect humanity," which sounds misleading, but is really saying that Christ the Hypostatic Union is worshipped on account of his divinity and venerated on account of his perfect humanity, in an additive and not mutually exclusive sense.

I'd argue that if you're not doing systematic theology like St. Thomas, talking about separate worship for the humanity and divinity of Christ has already taken you far afield of Nicene Christianity. Later on, Chalcedon would seem to argue with any other interpretation:

our Lord Jesus Christ is to us One and the same Son... acknowledged in Two Natures unconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; the difference of the Natures being in no way removed because of the Union, but rather the properties of each Nature being preserved, and (both) concurring into One Person and One Hypostasis

And of course the Miaphysites, who disagreed with that definition, did so because they believed it wasn't insistant enough on the inseparability of the divine and human! In recent times, they insist on the formula that the humanity and divinity are inseparable "except in thought," i.e. when you're doing a Summa and not in actual worship. Chalcedonians, including Catholic theologians, agree with that stipulation.

Except in the tomb, Catholicism doesn't really like talking about Christ's body apart from his human soul and divine person. It's for that reason, when affirming the Eucharist to be the real body of Christ, they're quick to add the gloss, "blood, soul, and divinity," because separating these things just isn't something they do. The tomb is a weird case -- maybe that's where your quotation was from? I'd be inclined to offer the crucified Lord latria in any case. The body is not separate from the soul, that it ever is is an abberation due to sin, which God will correct on the last day.

It's... had a lot of governance Issues for a long time, and there's the normal coastal politics (did you know NixCon had Anduril sponsorships, the sridhar ban). I don't grok the entire point of the Nix project, but from what I've seen via shlevy on twitter, the NixOS governance has been kinda the center of a turf war since ~2021 (with the first community team rfc, not enacted).

A lot of recent heat seems to be downstream of Eelco, the original dev, officially stepping down and handing control over to the Foundation Board. He's not been active much for a while, but the community was largely willing to overlook a lot of moderation and management decisions running very much by the seat of everyone's pants, under the auspices that he'd be kinda overlooking things. In theory, there's supposed to be constitutional convention and a foundation board meeting and a whole bunch of stuff about distribution of power and oversight, but in practice, there's not really much clear way for anything to happen beyond the Foundation writing whatever policies it thinks will be popular in California -- see the sponsorship policy snafu, and specifically how the forum auto-locked the discussion and moderators forbid opening new threads on it (and the thread OP was tempbanned for being a putz).

But the recent snafu is about more generally around the ethos that:

But I am exhausted to live in a world, in a society and to imagine that I live in a community where questions like “why should we introduce the political opinion to make empathy mandatory or inclusive language” can be read, this is seriously disturbing.

There's a code of conduct in place, people want it expanded significantly, and that people are allowed to question it are evidence that it should have been expanded years ago, if not evidence of governance failures or destructive to the reputation of the community; sprinkle in some mentions of sealioning and concern trolling, and you're done.

Hmmm I spend time around both, more around wokes / progressives and I really don't see it.

When I think about the thoughts that motivate someone who leans progressive, I think things like George Floyd, the idea of someone not being able to pay off medical debt and foregoing care as a result, black kids who can't get good jobs because of racism, imagining a kid who died in a school shooting because we don't have gun control, someone who's mocked for being gay, etc. And also the strong social taboos, and internally confusing the social taboo with justifiably taking offense at words that harm people. I'm having trouble of thinking of an interaction where it felt like people were really, genuinely, afraid that history would judge them. They feel much more afraid that their current social group will judge them.

I am sure that some people exist who feel this way, but all of the therapists I know (which is bounded by these people being mostly physicians, or PHD/PsyD psychologists), think that shit is nuts (and have much displeasure with the popular presentation of therapy, mental illness and so on).

Telling men to pursue fun degrees (creative writing, film, political science, etc.) rather than lucrative ones is like telling them to wear makeup and wait to be asked out by women. It's a fundamental denial of reality. Those who follow such advice will generally have drastically reduced romantic success. Their prospects will be fewer, worse, and less happy to marry them than they would have been otherwise.

My guess is that straight men who do creative writing and screenwriting get laid much more than straight men who do software engineering or physics. Even political science, as @Bartender_Venator says below.

They're around (vastly) more women, will have largely female social circles in many cases, meet more women in the course of their professions and have jobs that women would (in many cases) like to speak to them about. That easily cancels out the engineer's larger paycheck.

If you want to get laid as a man, studying English literature and spending your 20s and early 30s being a bum in a band and working part-time bartending gigs in Brooklyn is far superior as a sexual strategy than literally any white collar profession will be. That isn't a recommendation.

Too bad for them that their elected politicians are. Or stated differently there is a chance for a realignment.

The downside is half the kids I know making $19/hr are paying $1.5k/mo in rent, $5.60/gal in gas, and there are hardly any used cars for under 10k.

Friends with a guy who drives 25 miles each way to do 2.5hr shifts at $18/hr. $37 after tax, minus $14 for gas. And he needs to save some of that $23 to buy a new car when his '89 with the doors held closed by baling twine finally dies.

I don't know if the math has really sunk in for him.

...Is to obviously discard any information that could be contrary to your assertion.

What information? Do you disagree with the statement that the general opinion of pre-modern thinkers was that women were inferior to men? Can you find any such figures who disagreed? Maybe you can, I'm sure there were a handful, but they're going to be vastly outnumbered by those who held the contrary position. Mary is a goddess*. She is inimitable. The fact that according to Christian mythology she was once a mortal woman is irrelevant to the role she actually occupies in existing religious practice. She should be compared to her fellow divinities, not mortal men, and she is certainly inferior to God the Father and to her own son. Having warrior and scholar goddesses didn't stop the Greeks from pacing such onerous restrictions on their women that it surprised their own contemporaries. The divine and human spheres are different, and the reverence of female divinities says little more about the role of women in actual existing human society than the frequency of incest in stories of the gods says something about the acceptability of incest between actual flesh and blood human beings.

It's the only way the species can continue. I ... I can't think of anything more prestigious.

Necessary doesn't equal prestigious. Actually it often indicates the opposite, since the mundane and commonplace is rarely exalted.

*Yes I know it's not latria it's dulia etc. etc.

I know it's ackshually dulia but if you don't assume Catholic doctrine is true, from an anthropological perspective Mary clearly occupies the role of a goddess in the religion.

I was referring to his earlier post. Where he talks about how God is referred to in scripture. Mormon scripture and it's interpretation differs from the Trinitarian majority a lot. He was making claims that only make sense in the context of his Mormonism. The LDS aren't some church, they are a very particular group with very different background assumptions from a standard church that only uses the Bible.

crushedoranges wants to imply that men are mostly picking women for their physical characteristics.

I think that while physical attraction governs who men might want to have sex with, there might be other considerations for long term relationships. At least some men would prefer a spouse who shares their interests, views et cetera, and having a similar degree of education might serve as a proxy for those.

I recently heard of yaslighting, which is where instead of convincing someone their true beliefs are delusional, you affirm their delusional beliefs and convince them they're true.

Seems to apply to a lot of things (especially transgenderism) but what I have in mind is college degree choice. Plenty of female-oriented degrees such as psychology, behavioral science, speech pathology, etc. require a Masters in order to really start working in the field. Seemingly, most of the people who study those majors just aren't aware of this.

I'm unsure whether these women just haven't googled the most basic facts of the career they'll spend their next 4-6 years pursuing, or whether they're semi-deliberately deluding themselves. My guess is the latter. If you're going to college to get married, you need to look like you have your own ambitions. Pursuing a highly-educated mate just isn't a respectable goal for women anymore.

My mother is one of these women. The way she describes it, she finished her Psychology bachelors and only then realized it would take another couple years to make a career out of it. She's extremely smart, conscientious, and logical. I can't imagine her as someone who would just forget to look into these things. During that time she married a man who would go on to become very successful, and I think that (marrying a good man, that is, not necessarily a rich one) must have been the ultimate goal all along, whatever she told herself in the process.

I'm starting to see a similar phenomenon among my siblings. My brothers have laid out step-by-step plans for college and their eventual careers. My sister just wants to study Psychology because it's interesting. None of them would breathe a word about the different expectations between the genders--the topic is somewhat taboo--but they nevertheless have Gotten the Message and are all pursuing seemingly effective strategies optimized for their gender.

My wife and I have broached the subject of Psychology careers a couple of times with my sister, and she seems actively disinterested in thinking it through. I expect she, like my mother, will get married sometime during or just after her Bachelor's degree, and claim she was unaware she needed a Master's to turn the major into a career.

This is all well and good. I find myself continually amazed at how good normies are at unconsciously separating reality from social reality and smoothly living by them both without acknowledging the contradictions. The problem arises when someone doesn't get the message and thinks the social reality is the reality, that men can "study what you enjoy" for 4 years in college with no lasting impact to career prospects or marriagability, or that women can do the same without searching for husbands and things will work out for them.

My wife is a teacher. Most of her coworkers fall into these categories. Some are men who pursued useless degrees and now work as aides. Others (the school's speech pathologists, behavioral interventionists, psychologists, etc.) are women who didn't end up getting married during their Bachelor's, and now are working very slowly towards Master's degrees while working.

American culture gets a lot of things wrong, but imo nothing so badly as gender roles. We encourage women to overeducate, in the process aging themselves out of the possibility of having children, and depriving the next generation of those who could have been their smartest and most capable mothers. It is seen as empowering and feminist to socially pressure women into denying one of the most natural human impulses, that of having and raising children, so that they can get more educated and make more money.

Telling men to pursue fun degrees (creative writing, film, political science, etc.) rather than lucrative ones is like telling them to wear makeup and wait to be asked out by women. It's a fundamental denial of reality. Those who follow such advice will generally have drastically reduced romantic success. Their prospects will be fewer, worse, and less happy to marry them than they would have been otherwise.

Telling women to not look for husbands in college, and focus on education, is similar, though its results manifest in different ways. Such women will (as they get more educated) grow increasingly unable to find comparably "impressive" partners. Many will remain single, sleeping around but never committing, while a few will "settle" many years down the road. Neither situation is great for raising a family.

Sometimes the people in the middle are hardest hurt--those who haven't bought into the modern secular ideology or the trad religious one. Women who don't go all-in on their careers, but also don't actively seek out husbands in college, and so end up in dead-end jobs with whatever mediocre husband they end up with.

American tfr fell to 1.62 in 2023, its lowest rate ever, and is even lower among our most intelligent and conscientious. Financial incentives meant to correct this in places like Finland and Turkey have accomplished very little overall. The problem is not financial, it is cultural and legal. People need to think of advice like "study your hobby and things will work out" as a malicious lie meant to signal a luxury belief. Motherhood needs to be far more prestigious than any career. Couples need to be allowed to mutually agree to contracts incentivizing them to stick together.

The truth is and always has been the truth, but more people need to be made more consciously aware of it. If women want large families, they need to start before finishing their Master's. I burned a lot of credibility with my immediate family getting married as young as I did, and sacrificing my social life and physical health to be financially ready for children quickly. This was the right decision, but it pains me to say I probably won't be able to convince them to do the same until after the crucial window has passed. I hope to convince you, though, or if you are already convinced, to offer you some ammunition convincing those you care about.

For the vast majority of people, the quality and quantity of their children will have far more of an effect on the future than anything else they could do. If you like being alive, and/or find it meaningful, it is likely your kids will too, and bringing them into the world to experience the joy of existence is an enormous gift you have the power to offer them. Less important, but still significant, 71% of Americans are happy with their decision to have children, or wish they had more, while only 10% wish they had less.

Whether for selfish or selfless reasons, having children early is the right call for most people, but our culture has conducted an enormous yaslighting campaign to prevent this from happening until it's too late.