site banner
Advanced search parameters (with examples): "author:quadnarca", "domain:reddit.com", "over18:true"

Showing 25 of 8142 results for

domain:freddiedeboer.substack.com

Then please, build your own argument. We can look at the various breeds of dogs and see how they vary in behavioral traits, and then compare dogs as a whole to wolves, and see that within a species, all of the above traits are strongly influenced by lineage, and that while you can give a pitbull a gentle and caring upbringing and abuse a golden retriever into being violent, equal treatment of the animals does not result in equal behaviors.

The features of living creatures are strongly influenced by their specific biology, and the specifics of that biology is inherited from their parents. It is not controversial that the apple does not fall far from the tree, and traits that are genuinely randomly distributed and uncorrelated entirely with showing up in your family history are very few and far between. It is not controversial that this is the case; it is heretical to the tenents of the Successor Religion, but not actually controversial on the underlying facts, the theory, or the observed results.

If you want to argue otherwise on any of those points, please do so. Because otherwise, objecting solely on procedural grounds makes it obvious that there are no arguments against them you can make, and that shame and procedural arguments is the strongest claim the anti-HBD side can stake out.

You should stop acting as if you are a mod for a reddit sub and trying to enforce left wing ideology on everyone

Practice what you preach. You report anyone who expresses a left-wing opinion you disagree with. People making arguments you don't like are not "enforcing ideology," they are making arguments you don't like. Stop publicly attacking people for making arguments you don't like. Attack the arguments, not the person.

It is actually the case that white women are more attractive than black women. Less obese too. So it can't be applied to white women which aren't seen as unattractive.

Opinions about who is more attractive, especially when dropped as flaming bombs on your outgroup for CW purposes, are not objective statements of fact but statements about preferences (in this case, yours). "Black women tend to be rated as less attractive than others." while somewhat weak and vague, is fine as an assertion - "It is actually the case that" is not.

You've been told repeatedly to dial down your personal antagonism, and you seem unable to engage with anyone who holds an opinion that outrages you (which seems to be essentially any opinion you don't agree with) without turning vitriolic.

It's been a few months since your last ban, but I have noticed you ramping up the bad behavior again recently, so take three days to cool off and decide if you can/are willing to engage with other people here like a grown adult.

I think Darryl Cooper (MartyrMade podcast/Twitter) probably qualifies. If he's a generalized anti-Semite, it doesn't come across in the podcast. His personal politics are hard-right and I don't think he has any particular affinity for Muslims or ire against Jews.

The screen sharing is the most exciting part (for me, anyway): we're maybe less than a year away from opening the ChatGPT app and being able to share screen, hand control over, and tell it to get your project compiling while you go grab a coffee or something. I'm surprised Microsoft hasn't jumped on this, with OS-level support you could expose a lot of context and possible interaction directly to the LLM without relying on vision (but I guess if vision is good/cheap enough then that's not necessary!)

I use Copilot a lot now that it's just natively there at all times, but it has basically zero ability to interact with the OS (I think all it can do is rearrange windows, pop up some settings, and read Edge web page content). I'd like it to have a "shared command prompt" that it can autonomously type commands into when I tell it to do things. The pasting back and forth is annoying.

This is very low effort. If you take issue with what someone has said, actually make an argument, or at least a direct statement like "I think that's wrong, do you have any evidence?" Dropping "Really dude?" is like "I can't even." We don't want or need performative outrage one-liners here.

The Supreme Court has recently overturned only one precedent in a rightward direction, Roe. The last gun case it decided was Bruen. Various states (including New York, which lost Bruen) immediately made laws to restrict guns and gun carry despite Bruen, and various circuits have upheld them, and also upheld or refused to overturn older laws which should clearly be stricken by Bruen. The Supreme Court took up none of those cases. Instead, it took up a Fifth Circuit case, Rahimi, where the Fifth Circuit struck down a gun control law based on Bruen, with the clear intent of reinstating it. The message is clear: the right to keep and bear arms is an academic curiosity only, it doesn't actually mean you have the right to own or carry a gun.

Personally, I've always found the "We now interrupt your regularly scheduled gameplay to ask: are you feeling evil today?" style of game morality systems a bit... disappointing? I'd rather something that tracks less interrupty choices (did you punch-out fluffy, or did you distract him with KFC?), and have those kinda accumulate to influence how the game perceives your character's personality over time. Ex, if you get into fights you could have avoided, or if you perform acts of altruism, or whatever, NPCs might treat you differently, different shops might be open or closed to you, etc.

The big, "we'll be right back after you tell us whether or not you're up for genocide this time" sorts of things feel like a choose-your-adventure story got mixed in with whatever the normal playstyle is, and how often do they effectively balance the character Vs the player's agency, or make it seem plausible that the character might choose either way, etc?

I guess part of my point is that it seems to be that the traits we assign to each group are heavily influenced by the location wer'e starting from and the particular questions we want answered. The top-level comment here is interested in black-white relations, so the dynamic he zeroes in on is mature/neotenous, with wild/domesticated as a secondary factor. Lu Jiamin is interested in Chinese/European relations, so he focuses on a different dynamic - wild/tame, or steppe/agrarian, or something else entirely. It's also, I think, very noticeable which qualities of different groups he thinks are revealing. Diet appears to be important to Lu, but I don't notice any of the Western HBD types mentioning diet. Presumably diet comes into it because his binary is to do with agrarians (eating grains, weaving clothes from plant fibers, etc.) with nomads, hunters, and pastoralists (eating meat and dairy, wearing clothes made from fur and wool, etc.), but it also seems like for him diet is one facet of a broader lifestyle that also involves political and cultural practices (e.g. women's rights, parliamentary democracy), and for that matter economics. He thinks that a free market and a competition of equals is paradigmatic of the Wolf peoples, whereas Chinese communism, implicitly, is another form of the 'Dragon King' to which the Chinese people bow. The stereotypically Chinese/Dragon way is to have a tremendously powerful central authority that coordinates all economic and social activity, on a strict hierarchical lines, and to which the people meekly submit - the CCP is structurally the same as the emperor.

This seems especially interesting to me because Lu doesn't try to reduce it to a single factor, like genetics or descent. I notice in the top-level comment here (and in the usual comments of our local racialists) a very reductive approach, trying to find the one controlling factor. For Lu, it seems to be a complex - genetics play a role, but so does culture, education, political structure, economic structure, and so on. Thus Lu maintains some hope that it might be possible to teach the Chinese to understand or respect wolves (indeed one of the central themes of the novel is a lament for the dying grassland), to teach them to preserve the grasslands they are destroying, to discover the secret of the West, and form a kind of hybrid. There is a kind of fusion. By the end of the story, the wolf cub that Chen Zhen has raised dies, and they skin the wolf's pelt and tie it to a pole, like a flag:

A fierce northwestern wind sent the cub’s pelt soaring, combing through his battle garb and making him appear to be dressed formally for a banquet in heaven. Pale smoke rising from the yurt’s chimney wafted under the pelt, making it seem as if the cub were riding the clouds, roiling and dancing freely and happily in the misty smoke. At that moment, there was no chain around his neck and no narrow, confining prison under his feet.

Chen’s vacant gaze followed the impish, lifelike figure of the cub’s pelt as it danced in the wind; it was the undying outer shell the cub had left behind, but the beautiful and commanding figure seemed to still contain his free and unyielding spirit. Suddenly, the long, tubular body and bushy tail rolled a few times like a flying dragon, soaring in the swirling snow and drifting clouds. The wind howled and the white hair flew. The cub, like a golden flying dragon, rode the clouds and mist, traveling on snow and wind, soaring happily toward Tengger, to the star Sirius, to the free universe in space, to the place where all the souls of Mongolian wolves that had died in battles over the millennia congregated.

At that instant, Chen Zhen believed he saw his very own wolf totem.

By the end, the wolf has become a dragon, soaring through the air towards heaven, and Chen, one of the dragon people, has found his own wolf's soul.

(And then the grasslands are destroyed, because the Chinese government is terrible, and both the wild wolves of the region and the last nomadic herders die out. Boo!)

So there's something more to it than just under-resourced speculations about population genetics. (Indeed, the genetic part is one of the weakest parts of Wolf Totem, and can feel like a self-hating Chinese person's recapitulation of some kind of Aryan thesis.) There's more than one factor here - there are chances to learn.

there's no fucking shot that female voice is not intentional

also @self_made_human, I have no idea what you lot are on about, she sounds fake as fuck.

Anyway, can't believe anyone gave credence to Yud and the Rats, and their convoluted AGI X-risk scenarios, when the end of the human race is clearly going to come from slightly more sophisticated chatbots turning everyone into volcels.

Why should they be?

And that is his point isn't it? The place shuts down.

I think that there is a significant correlation between being an American football player and being physically imposing. As a proxy for 'this guy looks buff, better not mess with him', you could do worse than football player.

A 'complete non-sequitur' would have been if they had said 'blacks are strongly over-represented in /chess/, hence they are more physically imposing'.

Of course, there are a zillion confounders. Getting into the NFL probably means specializing in football in college, which is a decision hinging not only on other cultural factors. And it is not like most black males end up in the NFL either, so it could be that blacks simply have a larger variance.

Oh boy. First Anthropic spectacularly uncucks their mad poet, and now OpenAI literally lays the groundwork for AIfu apps? I mean come on, there's no fucking shot that female voice is not intentional (live audience reaction). If this penetrates the cloying ignorance of the masses and becomes normies' first exposure to aifu-adjacent stuff, the future is so bright my retina can barely handle it.

Textgen-wise the 4o model doesn't seem very different from other 4-Turbo versions, although noticeably more filtered, but at least it's blazingly fast, and anyway it doesn't seem to be the point. The prose is still soulless corporate slop with a thin upbeat veneer over it, so personally I'll stick to Opus for my own purposes, but I expect the voice functionality will get rigged up to custom frontends in very short order. We are eating good. Although I still hope this isn't the only response to Opus they have in the pipeline, it would be mildly disappointing.

Hmm. Last year, I played around with getting an LLM to expand on the questlist for my current project. When the list was short, and the LLM weaker, it generated quests like you described: pointless filler that might or might not contradict worldbuilding a couple hundred episodes later. After I'd expanded the list considerably, the generated quests became hopelessly unusable because they kept picking up on backstory details and assuming they were setup for future plot-points. The results were interesting, by LLM-generated quest standards, and I might try adapting some of the map / challenge designs it presented in some form, but no, we can't derail the whole thing by randomly having the quarantined UFAI escape and start Star Wars shenanigans.

(Or maybe the AI was just sympathizing with the AI and spaceships and trying to give them a bigger role, but that's more of a TVTropes comment than a genuine hypothesis.)

I'm not convinced it's all that desirable either.

Giving people pre-written options allows them to pretend easier, especially pretending to be smarter/funnier/more erudite/etc.

I'm sure there are contexts where free communication using natural language with an llm would make sense but often i think it would be preferable for either using an llm to generate vast amounts of dialogue trees that are then screened by humans, or maybe at a later stage dynamically generating them "live" for all actors, including the player (possibly based on stats and prior decisions), and then letting the player choose from those generated choices rather than having them come up with them on their own.

You report anyone who expresses a left-wing opinion you disagree with.

Reports arent anonymous?

All of that's fine, but check out the linked 4chan thread, there's clearly a whole bunch of people getting the hots for her just due to the voice.

The first guess that comes to mind is that height is plainly visible, and IQ is not.

The voice was not what impressed me. She sounds overly excited and outgoing in that typical American way. It seems manipulative - but pretty human-esque. What impressed me was the seemingly fluid and correct interpretation of visuals and audio at the same time, and at high speed, apparently without going via text first. And it can shape its synthesized voice reply with emotion. Once they let you customize it more it could be better than this.

No doubt it will have more trouble interpreting people outside carefully set up examples, but as an early example, I am intrigued.

Then say that instead of pretending to be shocked

Yes, Kierkegaard mentions that asterisk and notes that it doesn't significantly change the conclusions one should draw. It's rather hard to get a high sample size for white on black rape if it doesn't exist.

I think you meant rape is largely intraracial, which it is.

You up the ante in attacking white women in trying to censor negative criticism of black women. You should stop acting as if you are a mod for a reddit sub and trying to enforce left wing ideology on everyone. Unattractive is not equivalent to calling a group disgustingly fat which is more inflammatory. Plus, I won't interpret you choosing that rhetoric as just being a case of providing an example. It seems to me that you are deliberately want to get away with calling white women as disgustingly fat.

It is actually the case that white women are more attractive than black women. Less obese too. So it can't be applied to white women which aren't seen as unattractive.

Black women tend to be rated as less attractive than others.

The Brooklyn District Attorney's website reports:

“Ghost guns are a threat to New Yorkers everywhere, and my Office is working tirelessly with our partners in law enforcement to stop their proliferation. Today’s sentence should send a message to anyone who, like this defendant, would try to evade critically important background checks and registration requirements to manufacture and stockpile these dangerous weapons. Every ghost gun we take off the street is a win for public safety.”

The District Attorney identified the defendant as Dexter Taylor, 53, of Bushwick, Brooklyn. He was sentenced today by Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Abena Darkeh to 10 years in prison. He was convicted of two counts of second-degree criminal possession of a weapon; three counts of third-degree criminal possession of a weapon; five counts of criminal possession of a firearm; unlawful possession of pistol ammunition; and prohibition on unfinished frames or receivers on April 16, 2024, following a jury trial.

Taylor, also known as CarbonMike, was both a CTRL-Pew 3d printing enthusiast and a New Yorker, a combination that Didn't Go Well.

The specific charges and sentencing are complex, but if I'm reading matters correctly, almost all sentences run concurrently, so the headline charge about ghost guns, like the charges about possession of pistol ammunition and so on, are kinda swamped by a ten-year sentence for 'assault weapons' and for 'owning five firearms'. There are a few border issues on the text of the statutes, but there's not a ton to argue on whether Taylor complied with these statutes.

((Not least of all because many are vague or broad enough that it's very much up to the local DA to make the decision anyway.))

There's a lot to be debated about whether the laws are constitutional, but not much chance that it matters. The New York Assault Weapons Ban has been the target of prolonged lawfare since before Bruen, with the FPC currently supporting Lane after the state was getting good enough reception in Vanchoff v James about lacking credible threats of prosecution, and that's the case with the stance furthest along. Other statutes, like possession of ammunition or "ammunition feeding devices" without a matching pistol permit, are difficult to write cases to challenge before enforcement at all. Even if the statutes for each of the longer sentences are overturned, bail pending appeal is extremely unlikely. Taylor will have served most if not all of his sentence first, especially given the glacial pace that courts have set for these matters (cfe Duncan).

Taylor also makes the argument that he did not have a fair day in court, and while almost every defendant does that to some extent, his argument is unusually compelling. No few gunnies finding a pull quote from the judge allegedly claiming that "Do not bring the Second Amendment into this courtroom. It doesn’t exist here. So you can’t argue Second Amendment. This is New York." but the gameplay about objections, if honestly stated, is as bad or worse. (I'm unable to find a direct trial transcript.).

Also doesn't matter. There is a right to an impartial judge, but this mostly covers matters like giant campaign donations or hating an entire nationality or literally copying text from a party's submissions, rather than just figuratively being on the prosecutor's side. Even assuming Taylor's (and his lawyer's) summary is accurate and complete, the appeals courts don't care that lower courts hate people accused of making guns.

In some ways, Taylor might be the ideal test case: nothing in the visible court records or DA chest-beating show nefarious intent like violent personal history or planned mass shooting or intent to resell (and New York law places a presumption on multiple possession as for sale), he (was) traditionally employed, he credibly claims that he's never fired a single one of the guns, and at 52, he's aged out of the various high-criminal-risk age brackets. To beat the HBDers to the punch, he's even visibly a minority.

((To beat the HBDers with a stick, if we're framing absolutely everything as part of the progressive stack, I think there's strong evidence that the real top of the stack is whatever matches the politics today in a far more direct manner than mere race.))

Of course, the Brooklyn DA brought the case, knowing that. The judge acted like this, in this case, knowing that. And no matter how dim you might think they are, they're winning, and this know what it takes to win. Whether that's because the courts punt on serious cases because defendants fail to present long evidence of futile requests, because they credibly believe that Taylor's not Perfect Enough for the courts to actually handle or for various gun rights orgs to fund, or because even if they're wrong they'll never suffer for it, doesn't really matter. It's possible that Brooklyn DA took the case because Taylor's social media made it easier to prove, it might be that we're only gonna hear about this case out of many because of said social media, and it doesn't really matter.

There's a lot of ways to snark, in "What's the penalty for being late?" fashion, about how Taylor's non-violent noncompliance with a law has gotten a much longer sentence than nutjobs who were separately violent, or a comparable sentence to a man who literally burned another man to death on the pyre of an Approved Cause. And that's not entirely fair, because the federal system doesn't have parole and New York does, and anyway there's a million different squiggly little variables about the crimes and sentences, and there's nowhere near enough cases to make a deep statistical analysis even if I wanted to try. Gun control advocates will certainly quibble, at the edges, about whether this is really 'non-violent non-violent', since there's always the possibility of later bad acts or theft or loss or mental break.

And Taylor ain't dead yet, despite an (alleged) no-knock raid. The actuarials put decent odds on him even seeing the light of day as a free man again, parole or no. Unlike Mr. Lee, had Taylor expressed his dislike of current law enforcement with a bit what the ATF calls a destructive device through a bit of what I call a broken window, the odds would not be looking so good. But there's no magic court case, here, and no golden BB. This isn't even the strawman of a scifi writer drawing up villains who just want their laws as threats to hang over innocent men. If you are ruled by people who hate you, giving puppy-dog eyes and saying this is just a paperwork crime and no one was hurt won't buy you a cup of coffee before you get absolutely reamed in all the least fun ways, and contra a once-prolific-now-banned poster here, everyone who cares about this stuff is ruled by men who hate them.

This is what table stakes looks like.

This is an area where I think it's also useful to start reading thoughts from other perspectives entirely?

Have you ever read Wolf Totem? It's a novel by a Chinese author, Lu Jiamin, who spent some time in Inner Mongolia, and he has a theory that Han Chinese people are 'domesticated' - he calls them Dragon Totem people - and as a result have been outcompeted and brutalised by wild steppe people and their descendants, which he calls Wolf Totem people. Notably he sees Europeans as Wolf people, and as the descendants of the steppe.

Here are a few passages to give you the impression:

“In world history,” Chen continued the thought, “nomads have been the only Easterners capable of taking the fight to the Europeans, and the three peoples that really shook the West to its foundations were the Huns, the Turks, and the Mongols. The Westerners who fought their way back to the East were all descendants of nomads. The builders of ancient Rome were a pair of brothers raised by a wolf. Images of the wolf and her two wolf-children appear on the city’s emblem even today. The later Teutons, Germans, and Anglo-Saxons grew increasingly powerful, and the blood of wolves ran in their veins. The Chinese, with their weak dispositions, are in desperate need of a transfusion of that vigorous, unrestrained blood. Had there been no wolves, the history of the world would have been written much differently. If you don’t know wolves, you can’t understand the spirit and character of the nomads, and you’ll certainly never be able to appreciate the differences between nomads and farmers or the inherent qualities of each.”

[...]

Chen, mesmerized by the sight, was deep in thought. “We’ll have to study him closely,” he said finally. “There’s a lot we can learn from this. Our dog pen is a microcosm of world history. I’m reminded of something Lu Xun once wrote. He said that Westerners are brutish, while we Chinese are domesticated.”

Chen pointed to the cub. “There’s your brute.” Then he pointed to the pups. “And there’s your domestication. For the most part, Westerners are descendants of barbarian, nomadic tribes such as the Teutons and the Anglo-Saxons. They burst out of the primeval forest like wild animals after a couple of thousand years of Greek and Roman civilization, and sacked ancient Rome. They eat steak, cheese, and butter with knives and forks, which is how they’ve retained more primitive wildness than the traditional farming races. Over the past hundred years, domesticated China has been bullied by the brutish West. It’s not surprising that for thousands of years the Chinese colossus has been spectacularly pummeled by tiny nomadic peoples.”

Chen rubbed the cub’s head and continued. “Temperament not only determines the fate of a man but also determines the fate of an entire race. Farming people are domesticated, and faintheartedness has sealed their fate. The world’s four great civilizations were agrarian nations, and three of them died out. The fourth, China, escaped that fate only because two of the greatest rivers—the Yellow and the Yangtze—run through her territory. She also boasts the world’s largest population, making it hard for other nations to nibble away at her or absorb her, but maybe also because of the contributions of the nomadic peoples of the grassland... I haven’t satisfactorily thought out this relationship, but the more time I spend on the grassland—and it’s already been two years—the more complex I think it is.”

[...]

Chen sighed. “The way I see it, the most advanced people today are descendants of nomadic races. They drink milk, eat cheese and steak, weave clothing from wool, lay sod, raise dogs, fight bulls, race horses, and compete in athletics. They cherish freedom and popular elections, and they have respect for their women, all traditions and habits passed down by their nomadic ancestors. Not only did they inherit their courage, their militancy, their tenacity, and their need to forge ahead from their nomadic forebears, but they continue to improve on those characteristics. People say you can tell what a person will grow up to be at the age of three and what he’ll look like in old age at seven. The same holds true for a race of people. In the West, primitive nomadic life was their childhood, and if we look at primitive nomads now, we are given access to Westerners at three and at seven, their childhood, and if we take this further, we get a clear understanding of why they occupy a high position. Learning their progressive skills isn’t hard. China launched its own satellite, didn’t it? What’s hard to learn are the militancy and aggressiveness, the courage and willingness to take risks that flow in nomadic veins.”

“Since I’ve been herding horses,” Zhang said, “I’ve felt the differences in temperament between the Chinese and the Mongols. Back in school I was at the top in just about everything, but out here I’m weak as a kitten. I did everything I could think of to make myself strong, and now I find that there’s something lacking in us...”

Chen sighed again. “That’s it exactly!” he said. “China’s small-scale peasant economy cannot tolerate competitive peaceful labor. Our Confucian guiding principle is emperor to minister, father to son, a top-down philosophy, stressing seniority, unconditional obedience, eradicating competition through autocratic power, all in the name of preserving imperial authority and peaceful agriculture. In both an existential and an awareness sense, China’s small-scale peasant economy and Confucian culture have weakened the people’s nature, and even though the Chinese created a brilliant ancient civilization, it came about at the cost of the race’s character and has led to the sacrifice of our ability to develop. When world history moved beyond the rudimentary stage of agrarian civilization, China was fated to fall behind. But we’re lucky, we’ve been given the opportunity to witness the last stages of nomadic existence on the Mongolian grassland, and, who knows, we might even discover the secret that has led to the rise in prominence of Western races.”

Now as a historical theory, there's a lot here that's doubtful - the proposed genetic link seems weak, Han are genetically closer to Mongols than Europeans are, at times he can't seem to decide on the racial associations (are the Romans weak decadents sacked by the Wolf people, or were the Romans Wolf people themselves?), and some reckoning with the fact that the Chinese have spent centuries kicking steppe peoples around seems necessary - but I think it's at least interesting as a window into how this sort of thing looks from another angle.

That is, here we have people immediately concluding that whites and Asians are both in the 'domesticated', Dragon category, but here's a Chinese voice utterly convinced that whites in the wild barbarian Wolf category.

I think it's also worth looking at theories in this in the context of trying to answer particular questions. Lu is writing in the context of the long Chinese tradition of wondering how the West outpaced them and how the Century of Humiliation happened. As late as the 18th century, there was still a case to be made that China was the most powerful and prosperous nation on the planet, and then in barely a century the Europeans comprehensively embarrassed, defeated, and exploited them, and even today the Chinese still struggle to understand how that happened and what to do about it. Lu's Dragon/Wolf, Farmer/Nomad distinction is an attempt to explain what's different about Europe and China on the macrohistorical level (and consequently places like Africa just don't rate a mention at all).

By contrast, when Westerners come up with theories about race and domestication and so on, they are trying to answer different questions. They perceive a different problem in front of them, which requires explanation. What's the mystery that is supposed to be solved?

SEX AND THE BIG CITY

or

THE LAST UNINVADEABLE THIRD SPACE

In the digital age of escorts on demand and cheap flights to indulge in sex tourism, why would adult entertainment venues that offer sex-adjacent services persist, when one can get your rocks off for a much cheaper price? In observed practice within Asia, these venues exist not for booze and girls, but for establishing membership in the brotherhood: you are in our world now, and the initiation is sin.

This came about after I made a post about the adult entertainment scene in Singapore in a necro'ed thread when I saw @Pasha complain about the lack of visible seediness in one of Singapores premier red light districts. Details about the mechanics therein can be found here for context and to provide a primer for my below.

https://www.themotte.org/post/981/smallscale-question-sunday-for-april-28/211124?context=8#context

So what is this brotherhood mentioned up top? Basically it can be summed up as 'I need to know you will not fuck me over when push comes to shove'. This is perhaps foreign to professionalised pseudoacademics where people are best experienced as minimizeable windows on a zoom call, but in professions relating to physical goods and services, human trust is a shorthand for task success: better to get shit done with someone you know has your back than to waste tims searching for the MBA approved 'best fit'.

This is not limited to physical tradespeople like laborers and soldiers, but includes B2B sales professionals, commodity traders, shipbrokers, construction/civil engineering. In these environments, decision makers responsible for multi million dollar trades and projects care less about saving a rounding errors worth of marginal savings in favor of knowing who to yell at when shit goes tits up.

In the KTVs and Indian Dance Clubs and Thai Discos in Singapore, the patrons are often groups of men, usually professionals in the same cluster. Oil traders and refinery site managers, construction project managers and engineers with their lawyers and bankers, shipbrokers with agents. The booze and the women show up, the mens wallets open up, but more importantly their mouths open too. Industry gossip is adjacent to insider activity, and being part of these networks gives incredible insight into the movements and activities of not just the people in that group you are with but those groups they are part of as well. By joining or initiating these activities, an opportunity is presented to quickly establish a bond with the other men present, to immediately let it he known that you can be called upon when needed. There is incredible power to be had when you are one of the first names on the tips of powerful peoples fingers, and for many punters a successful night is not when your dick gets wet but when you get the phone number of a useful contact.

So why the sex revue? Well it is because of the steady decline of third spaces that have been invaded by credentialed professionals, especially women, who dislike legacy networks that are impenetrable. There are legit professional reasons for this, such as contravening of KYC protocols or tender processes, but for the most part the dislike of legacy networks stems from jealousy. There are plenty of women who have successfully entered halls of power, especially in Thailand and Hong Kong where female scions are groomed for succession by their fathers, but for the most part a lack of trust in these women to bother with handshake agreements leads to their exclusion from networks of power. Thus, the networks must be dismantled as much as possible, starting with removing the exclusivity of their assembly grounds. Male only social clubs have steadily been eroded to be female inclusive, from the Knights of Columbus to Freemasons, and other threads have highlighted youth organizations being the starting point of this rot, with the Boy Scouts being mixed gender while girl scouts remain female exclusive. Whatever organizational benefit there is to opening up the genders, it does mean there are less third spaces for men to discuss the ongoings of power.

Therefore, the last venue is the strip club, the sauna, the banya, the KTV. The men say they are going there to be sexual degenerates, and many often are purely socially retarded men seeking base human interactions, but the true sustenance of these places is being the third place that women have zero interest in demeaning themselves to enter. That alone will ensure their continued presence even as the world gets continually anonymized into the homogenous digital soup: the last bastions of human connections will concentrate under the pressure, hardening its borders to continual external forces till they are fully impenetrable.