domain:gurwinder.substack.com
Folamh3
1hr ago
But Julia was an outlier, and only avoids repercussions by putting on a tremendously convincing performance of the type of woman Winston thinks she is.
RegularlyExpressed
1hr ago
My grandfather(RIP) used to tell the story of how when he first started college he could find a job in an afternoon for his spending money, and can anyone do that anymore? I did it in the 2010's. And it seems to be that the now-hiring signs adorning many stores and restaurants are there with this expectation, elsewise why would they exist?
This is anecdotal and not hugely relevant to the wider point you're making but this doesn't resemble my experience of looking for menial jobs during the year between high school and University (early 2010s as well). I must have asked for a job at most stores or establishments in my hometown of about 10k people, until after four months or so I managed to get a job cleaning a petrol station at 6am in a town 10 miles away. These were mostly in-person applications of the sort you described, occasionally on the phone, and sometimes online (for places like supermarkets that have official hiring channels). I also remember that those stores and restaurants with now-hiring signs in the windows would always ask if I had any prior experience, and then let me know that they weren't interested in hiring someone who had none.
TIRM
1hr ago
MeTop
The gay version of Me Too. But it is more bragging about fucking another guy than complaining about Aziz Ansari being awkward.
bro
1hr ago
That piece is explicitly talking about it as a pre-existing term that was already in use.
Supah_Schmendrick
1hr ago
Thinking about the past, it makes me smile how much it was common to hear, until twenty years ago, that women are very uninterested in politics, unlike men. For my generation, this idea looks absurd. Men do not care about politics at all.
I'm not sure what culture you're from/what tropes you're dealing with, but the idea that "women don't care about politics" hasn't been a significant part of anglosphere culture for at least the last 200 years, as far as I can tell. Instead, women have been at the forefront of just about every moralistic movement that I can think of in the anglosphere, from religious awakenings, the abolition of slavery, progressive uplift of the lower-classes, anti-alcoholism, anti-drugs, etc. A certain species of feminine moral busybodying over far-away causes actually gets lampooned from time to time in mainstream anglosphere literature.
To clarify, I've never been reported to the authorities for asking a girl out either.
Edited my post so it was a bit less facetious on this point than I realise it might have looked (not that it really changes much of what either of us are saying)
WhiningCoil
2hr ago
If the OP has experiences anything like myself, you hate the world because "the world" seems to be actively propagating preposterous lies and blood libel enabling sociopathic behavior among a select group of untouchables. And the "victims" that choose the sociopathic untouchables over yourself have credulously lapped up every lie, directly leading to you being thrown under the bus by people you trusted. Family with deep ties, friends you've known for decades, coworkers you overcame profound challenges and found success with. The anointed sociopath with politically relevant melanin content washes all that away. You're lucky if even a single person overcomes the firehose of bullshit propaganda, overcomes their cognitive dissonance, and even privately supports you. If you expect public support, you are out of your fucking mind.
2rafa
2hr ago
One on occasion encounters women who have at various stages been jezebel (less successfully ‘maiden’), mother and matriarch and it is indeed very impressive, a unique social role because it requires a series of experiences that are (cumulatively) very rare among women.
ResoluteRaven
2hr ago
New Caledonia
For those of you who don't know, New Caledonia is a large Pacific island territory of France. Proposed changes in voting laws there that would extend the franchise to French settlers who have been resident on the island for ten years, diluting the political influence of the indigenous Kanak people. This has led to violent riots, declaration of a state of emergency, and the deployment of police reinforcements from France proper.
SSCReader
2hr ago
Because they are basically management in this scenario. I work for my boss, but that doesn't indicate my boss doesn't bring value. Now there are plenty of bad managers who do not bring value and do exploit their workers, but that doesn't mean that management in and of itself does not bring value when it comes to organizing workers efficiently. Given sex work is generally illegal it seems likely that many pimps do indeed lean towards the exploiting end but that doesn't mean the concept of pimping is invalidated.
TIRM
2hr ago
There's something to this. Most unmarried men, married men and married women vote Republican. Most unmarried women vote Democrat.
ResoluteRaven
2hr ago
I assume they're going to be intentionally vague on this, but would fall back to 1967 borders if pressed.
SSCReader
2hr ago
Again the vast majority of that is about him manipulating other people, weaponizing their beliefs to his own advantage. Cult leaders do the same with religious beliefs. It just seems odd to hate his victims. Like it would be odd to hate the world because some people fell for Jim Jones. I can understand hating your former friend or indeed Jim Jones but the fact that people fall for a presumably at least superficially charming person doesn't still seem like a great reason to hate the world, rather than hating the people who manipulate the world. The people who went to bat for him, presumably did so because they believed he was a sympathetic victim not a monster.
I've encountered people like him (minus the fire axe, substituting a broken pint glass) and many people did believe he was a lovely person and he took advantage of that over and over. But it didn't make me hate the world so much as hate him. People generally assume other people are operating in good faith in personal relationships and that allows people who are willing to cheat and lie to take advantage of it. You are a victim of him, but so are the people that believed his lies and manipulations. They didn't side with him because they hated you, they sided with him because he knew exactly what to say and how to say it.
You and the world are both victims of people like him. Hating your fellow victims is I think missing the point. Having said that it seems like a terrible experience and I am sorry you were dragged into his machinations.
RegularlyExpressed
2hr ago
Immaterial. The moment you deny the claims of the Palestinians to the land, you implicitly deny the much older and less substantial Israeli connection to the land. If the Palestinians don't have any claim after 76 years, the jews definitely don't after several thousand.
Good thing I already stated that the original claim to the land is irrelevant. The original European claims to the new world weren't justified, but their descendants are still justified in living there.
One state solution with full democracy, or a two state solution.
Glad to hear you support a two state solution, although that sounds rather at odds with your previous comments such as:
If destroying their homes to make way for Israel is acceptable, destroying Israeli homes to make way for Greater Palestine is equally acceptable.
If I break into your home and kick you out, I don't get to call you the aggressor when you return in a few months and try to retake your home.
So are Hamas not the aggressors? In any case, if you support a two state solution I'm not sure why you would take Palestine's side when the majority of Palestinians don't want a two-state solution, but continued massacres of Israeli citizens. I also wouldn't expect you to be so dismissive of Israel's unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005. As acts of good faith go, it's significantly more encouraging than this latest example of Gazan diplomacy.
This isn't actually something that I said - please don't put words into my mouth. I in no way suggested that the Israelis accept getting slaughtered.
So then I'm unsure why you would hold the fact that Israel exerts influence in Gaza post-2005 against them, given that it's pretty much only for the purpose of preventing Hamas continuing to fire rockets at them and commit atrocities.
Depends on the individual context. There's a big difference between someone having their home stolen by the nazis, and someone selling off their property at the height of the Weimar republic and moving to America. That said, I was under the impression that Germany essentially already did this.
I'm pretty sure the ~6 million Jews who were final solution'ed had their homes stolen by the Nazis. Nevertheless, it does seem a bit more complex than I thought, with Germany having gone to impressive lengths to recompense Holocaust survivors. The point doesn't change though - we can talk about Jews who can trace their heritage to people who were expelled during earlier central European pogroms, or Native Americans whose ancestral lands are now covered in cities full of Europeans they had no choice in allowing the development of.
YE_GUILTY
2hr ago
Does anyone have any thoughts on the spate of propellantless propulsion efforts currently being made?
Until I put my fingers in the nail marks, and put my hand in its side, I will never believe.
atelier
Jimmys: unrustled
2hr ago
I got a good laugh at the man ping ponging across the river after dropping off the goat.
To clarify, I've never been reported to the authorities for asking a girl out either. I'm not arguing that any man who's less than maximally attractive who asks out the wrong girl will inevitably end up with his career destroyed and his life in ruins - that's preposterous. I'm merely arguing that there has been a concerted effort among feminists to stigmatise male dating behaviour which would have been seen as perfectly innocuous a generation ago; that the most severe consequences for a social media cancellation campaign can be disastrous for men targeted by them (e.g. the Shitty Media Men List, the more recent "Are we dating the same guy?" Facebook groups); and that this produces an inevitable chilling effect on the behaviour of socially awkward men who are aware of the new norms (which is most of them). Much as cancellers cancel people who contradict woke orthodoxy in order to send a message to onlookers, the cancellation of men for being "creepy" (i.e asking out a woman who isn't interested) is intended to send a message to socially awkward men. It may well that your risk of professional repercussions as a result of a particular socially awkward man asking out the wrong girl are only 1 in 1,000, or 10,000, or a 100,000 - but if it makes him 10 or even 5% more risk-averse (and if every socially awkward man is making the same calculation) that will have massive knock-on effects on the dating economy, the loneliness/sexlessness epidemic and the fertility rate.
Thinking about the past, it makes me smile how much it was common to hear, until twenty years ago, that women are very uninterested in politics, unlike men. For my generation, this idea looks absurd. Men do not care about politics at all.
Yeah, well, look how it's working out for 'The West'.
Absolute shambles. In the 'Great Game' of global hegemony, the 'West' is the drunk guy who thinks he's playing checkers, but he's so drunk he doesn't understand he's actually playing chess, against a guy who's perfectly sober.
Meanwhile, in China, you're only supposed to care about politics if it's literally your job. Any random civilian caring about politics is viewed (rightly) with suspicion, perhaps partly genetic due to the millenia of rebels getting executed.
So, you had an absolutely typically female hysterical reaction to Ukraine war, with sanctions that resulted in exports to Russia crashing, and exports to Russian neighbors booming. Russia is still chugging along with the war, meanwhile European economy doesn't look too hot.
But a less well known example: 1 million 244: The 40 year long rare earth mineral boondoggle.
TL;DW:
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rare earths are crucial for renewables (wind turbine magnets etc) and nice for electric cars.
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processing them is very hard, harder than uranium enrichment actually to be cost-effective at it. It's a whole bunch of chemically very similar elements that occur together.
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China having little energy has a strategic interest in energy production and e-cars that actually makes sense. They went into this in early 1980s
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'The West' gimped rare earth processing companies in 1980s with a nonsensical rule change that put 'thorium', byproduct of RE processing on par with uranium. I'd love to know whether this preceded the Chinese strategic decision to aim for e-cars and so on.
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all the processing was outsourced to China. China stole and improved upon all the IP. They also subsidize RE processing and control the market. RE processing, thanks to their subsidies, is unprofitable everywhere. IF you try to set up your own industry, they'll tank prices just to make every startup go bankrupt.
This is all very funny because:
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rest of the world doesn't really need most RE. Renewables are a scam. Chinese mandate electric cars ( you won't even get a car plate) unless the car is electric, in preparation for WW3 and the naval blockades.
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e-cars don't really need them, but it's apparently mildly easier to make them good if you have ample RE.
YE_GUILTY
2hr ago
Are there women on this forum?
There was a time (not after 2018-ish, I think) when the broader community of Scott Alexander's commenters seemed to me to be so, so heavily XY-chromosomed that it seemed safer to assume that, when someone said "as a woman," what was meant was specifically "as a trans woman," and when someone said "my husband" or "my boyfriend," what they were implying was that they were a gay male.
It would take much stronger evidence than that to budge my priors: they'd have to speak of doing something that only double-X people did, like "being pregnant" or "reading fanfiction."
I no longer think that the tilt of this community is this extreme; perhaps it's more of a change in me than a change in the community. But I do recall not being the only one to observe this in the broader rationalist community: I vaguely remember (some EA luminary?) saying that they had less of a gender gap than they had an assigned-sex-at-birth gap, but I don't know for sure.
practical_romantic
2hr ago
lol at atlanta or chicago. Miami is a far far better setting IMO, something about tropical weather, large coastline and whatnot.
No_one
2hr ago
You'e talking as if developing replicator technology and getting as far and as fast off from the rest of you humanity wasn't the default position of every person with an ounce of self preservation.
People are insane these days due to being disconnected from actual material reality. It's going to get far, far worse with more wealth. Either we get thought control and become some weird hive mind, or people will be getting ever more insane because they can and because our minds were not designed or evolved to cope with modernity.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2hr ago
Being really really pro-Ukraine (ie. above the usually required level in Western societies) is pretty male-coded too, though, in my experience. Most NAFOids don't seem to be female.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2hr ago
I don't think that Musk is particularly a contrarian figure. He has drifted to a certain viewpoint and crowd - 'alt-lite', for the lack of a better word - and rarely seems to take an opinion that doesn't fit to that mold. (Indeed, he's already a meme for not taking a firm opinion on stuff where he seems to be doing so at all - "Interesting", "Looking into this" and so on.)
An actual contrarian in the sense that I'd mean would be someone like Michael Tracey, who has a tendency to drift into a certain crowd and instantly start taking viewpoints contrary to the ideas of that crowd, just to challenge them. Ie. when Tracey seems too close to the right he starts shitting on them, when Tracey got too appreciated by pro-Russians he started saying Russia is not right about everything, so on.
No_one
2hr ago
But I can’t say I ever expected Ukraine to come out on top.
Given the pushback I've been getting here over the last years, there's a good few people who expected it. One would think so, except it's apparent the entire military procurement sector in the West is vastly more corrupt than in Russia.
Vice had an article about it.
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