domain:parrhesia.co
RenOS
something is wrong
2d ago
I'm pretty confident that if Bezos would have married a literal nubile twenty something, we would have feminist journalists write about how this proves that men are shallow. If he had married a lower class mexican wife, it would be decried as vaguely coercive and that this proves men enjoy power differentials. If he had married white trash, he would be ridiculed as going back to his roots. Hell, if he married a conventionally attractive, age-appropriate, low-agency woman with a conventional job, that would probably also be insinuated as some sort of tradwife, wanting the woman to go back to the kitchen situation.
As several people have pointed out, Sanchez is in many ways precisely the sort of high-agency go-getter that should be popular with feminists, but who in practice always seems to be hated instead. In practice, feminist journalists always want highly successful men to marry women like themselves.
Semi-related probably Friday Fun Thread Material But It Fits So I'm Posting It Here Anyway: A couple years ago I crashed a billionaire-adjacent wedding. To avoid burying the lede, it was this wedding, which, being a flamboyantly gay wedding was a lot kitschier than anything Bezos could ever dream of. The lucky groom was 84 Lumber magnate Joe Hardy's grandson, and was held at Nemacolin Woodlands Resort, which resort was owned by Mr. Hardy and is now managed by said groom's mother, and which I'm surprised hasn't changed much since Mr. Hardy's death since it was a vanity project that lost money and that his daughter was supposedly planning on changing to make profitable after the old man kicked.
ANYWAY, I serve on the board of a nonprofit that was having our annual kickoff party at a nearby bar and was attended by a friend of ours who happens to work at the resort. My friends and I had no idea about this wedding, but our friend was talking about how he worked long hours getting ready for this elaborate event, the point of which was to avoid actually having to work the event, and mentioned a few details like that it was taking place at a certain golf hole. It was at this point that someone, possibly me, suggested that we should crash the event. Although the resort wants you to think otherwise, most of the roads on what appear to be the resort grounds are public, as there are several in-parcels with private houses on them beyond the front gates. It would be trivially easy to park alongside the golf course and sneak into the wedding, especially after dark.
No dice, our friend said, while the ceremony itself was at the hole, that had already taken place in the morning, and the actual reception was being held in a tent at a different part of the golf course, and it wouldn't be possible to just slip inside unnoticed. It was at this point that the plan began to crystalize. Outside would have actually been worse, since it was early June and didn't get dark until after 9 pm. Our attempts to pump him for information were only marginally successful, as he was under strict orders of confidentiality and only revealed the location of the ceremony because it had already happened that morning. We reminded him that he was leaving his position in a month as he had just passed his home inspector's test, but he wouldn't budge. Luckily, I had already established that the festivities were expected to go rather late into the night, but weren't starting any later than normal, so we figured 8 pm would be the ideal time to go.
My plan took advantage of one simple idea: Act like you're supposed to be there. The problematic thing about a wedding like this, though, is that it's a sit-down dinner with a strict guest list that's been planned and executed in secrecy precisely to keep people like us away from the thing. But, do to our unique circumstances, this presented an opportunity. While acting like you're supposed to be there is essential, it isn't always enough. We also needed a plausible reason to be there; simply saying my name and demanding entry probably wouldn't work. So that gets us to the third thing we could take advantage of, that these billionaire events always have lots of people involved, both as guests and as staff. Our being admitted wouldn't be dependent on getting past the host or hostess, but getting past somebody who ostensibly knows who is supposed to be there but realistically can't pick any of the guests out of a police lineup.
The one snag was that our event didn't end until five, and as board members we couldn't just leave. I happened to live an hour away, optimistically, from both the event venue and the wedding venue, more like 60–90 minutes, and the cover story I had in mind wouldn't work if we got there too late, and I didn't happen to bring a suit with me when I left the house that morning. One of the participating couples that lived close said I could just shower at their house, but that didn't solve the suit problem, and going home and coming back would be a tight squeeze that might hold up everyone else. At first, I saw no way around this problem, until I realized that I didn't have a date. So I frantically began calling women I knew to see if they were interested in crashing a billionaire wedding on short notice, if you happen to be free tonight, and also wouldn't mind stopping by my house and rooting around for suitable clothing. Luckily, this is where having a good bartender comes in handy, and since I knew she was off that night she was thrilled to engage in a bit of semi-illegal fun.
Shortly thereafter, having made a serious omission, called my friend back and instructed her to stop at the liquor store and pick up a bottle of Jim Beam, two handles of Vladimir vodka, and a bottle of the most ridiculous liquor she could find that wasn't super expensive. She was then to go to Dollar Tree and get cards, two gift bags, tissue paper, and delicate wrapping paper. By the time she arrived two of us had showered and the third was in there and would be putting on her face soon, giving my date plenty of time to shower and get ready herself. In the meantime, the we put the Vladdy in a large box and wrapped it, and put the Beam and the other bottle in the gift bags. To my friend's credit she picked up Slivovitz, which was such an obvious choice that I was embarrassed that I hadn't thought of that myself. For those not aware, it's a plum brandy that's behind the bar at every hunky bar in Pittsburgh that nobody ever drinks except on a dare. We then filled out the cards in the most ridiculous way possible. Mine was full of Yiddishisms and sentences like "Your cousin Nathan is going to be a pharmacist. Good money in that." My gift of choice would have been a set of towels that said "His" and "His", but we were unfortunately under a time crunch. The third couple arrived and we all piled into my friend's 2004 Lexus SUV that he ironically brags to everyone about owning, figuring that a. We can all fit, and b. If we have trouble getting in, he can say "Did I mention I own a Lexus?"
We got there a little after 8. It being light out was a better break than we'd originally thought; since we didn't know where the tent was, it was much easier to drive around looking for it fully exposed without headlights making us more noticeable from a distance. We located the tent and found a place to park. The first hurdle came when it became readily apparent that most of the guests were staying at the hotel and that they were shuttling them back and forth in golf carts. Minor detail; the cover story takes care of that. Just keep going. Act like you're supposed to be here.
We arrive at the entrance to the tent, which is of course heavily guarded by black-clad hospitality employees with walkie talkies. "Hi, Rov_scam and guest". I give my real name, which the guy is frantically looking through the clipboard and not finding. My friends give their names, which of course also aren't on the list. This was the first point that I considered that giving three uninvited names in a row might raise some alarm bells, but no worries, act like you're supposed to be there. "You know what, we're coming from the Schwa Foundation fundraiser and we left notes with the RSVPs that we wouldn't be eating dinner. That might be why there's a mixup." I had actually thought of this well beforehand, but it seemed to allay the guy's concerns. "I'm sorry, but none of you are on the list."
At this point, the weaker-willed among us might have given up. The odds were stacked against us. We had just given three names that weren't on the list and a cockamamie story about why we were late. This guy was in no position to let us in. But one thing I do not stand for is being denied access. Asked to leave? All the time. Escorted from the premises? Almost weekly. You can keep the jeans if you promise not to come back to this store? More than once. But I will at least afford myself the opportunity to be thrown out. "Well, I don't know what to tell you," I said, standing there, my date holding a gift bag and two other couples with us similarly situated. Act like your supposed to be here. Someone who was actually invited wouldn't just leave because they weren't on some list. He gets on his walkie talkie and a woman who looks like a supervisor comes over. He explains that we aren't on the list, and looks relieved that this conundrum is out of his hands. I explain everything to the woman, this time adding that I'm on the board of the Schwa Foundation, my friend is on the board of another nonprofit that she may have heard of (which he is), and my other friend is associated with the local tourist bureau, which she is for the next two weeks before she gets canned in a shakeup.
If you know anything about Joe Hardy, it's that he wants to die broke and that he will do practically anything for Fayette County, the poorest county in Pennsylvania. It would be perfectly understandable if he took his money and bought an estate in some old-money suburb like Fox Chapel (where he could hobnob with John Kerry and Theresa Heinz) or Sewickley Heights (where he could hobnob with Mario Lemieux), but instead he lives in a house on his resort, that may be an unprofitable vanity project but one driven by his desire for Fayette County to have a five star resort. He served a term as commissioner, which is like Donald Trump serving on Palm Beach city council or some other local government position that's all work and no prestige. The idea that we might have some legitimate connection to Mr. Hardy's philanthropic activities wasn't beyond the realm of possibility. Actually, his daughter had given us a reasonably generous donation, though it was officially on behalf of the resort, and we never actually met with her.
At this point, it's clear that the supervisor is in a serious bind. There are three options, none of them particularly great. The most obvious option would be to engage the hostess to verify that these were legitimate guests who had been omitted from the list by mistake. Unfortunately, this would mean interrupting Ms. Hardy-Knox in the middle of her son's wedding reception through a tacit admission that her own staff is unable to control something as simple as a guestlist. Even worse, this party was planned under the strictest confidence. The fact that six random bozos were even able to get this close and that she briefly considered letting them in and went so far as interrupting her evening to be sure. It meant that someone had loose lips and various heads would surely be rolling down the fairway the following morning.
The second option would be to simply state unequivocally that we weren't on the list and that if we didn't leave immediately security would be involved. This also isn't a very attractive option. Remember, this event is super secret and the fact that we even know about it means it's highly likely that we were actually invited. We both look and act like we're supposed to be there. We're involved in organization that would plausibly get a token invitation. We have a plausible cover story for being late. For all this woman knows, we are six duly invited guests, three of whom are prominent members of the local community, who went to great lengths to attend, and by categorically denying us entry they would be causing Ms. Hardy-Knox a significant degree of personal humiliation and she would end up having to spend the following week apologizing on behalf of her staff, Nemacolin Woodlands Resort, and practically the entire 84 Lumber Corporation, ensuring us that various heads were as we speak rolling down the fairway, not to mention the fact that someone on the event planning staff must have fucked up royally to omit our names from the guestlist just because we weren't eating.
Or, they could, of course, just let us in. Remember, this event is super secret and the fact that we even know about it means we're probably invited. Besides, we're Acting Like We're Supposed to Be There. We come bearing gifts. We're standing there patiently, sympathetic to the conundrum we're putting this woman in. What's the worst that could happen if she lets us in? We're all above the age of 35 and don't look like the kind of demographic that would get drunk and cause a scene. It's dark inside, and loud inside, and Ms. Hardy-Knox may have been imbibing, and there are literally hundreds of people there, and it's highly unlikely that our hostess recognizes all of them personally.
So she let us in, because, when it comes down to it, what choice did she really have? What's the worst case scenario for us? She asks us who we are, and we give her our real names and positions. And at that point she doesn't know that we weren't on the list and either assumes we were legitimate guests or were invited by mistake. In the event she asks us to leave, we at first act incredulous that we're being asked to leave a party we were invited to for no reason, but we eventually comply. Luckily, this never came up. She did approach us as we were leaving and made small talk and it was pretty clear she wasn't entirely sure who we were but she was very nice nonetheless and thanked us for coming.
The party itself? It was dope, as the kids say. It seems like over the past 30 years there's been an arms race in middle class weddings, where what was once a buffet dinner at a fire hall is now a plated dinner at a special wedding venue with assigned seats and appetizers a waiter brings around. But as much as the doctors, and lawyers, and engineers of the world may break the bank for their special day, they will never even come close to what you can do when money is absolutely no object. For instance, the article only shows a couple pictures from the actual reception, and it looks like those were taken at some point before I weaseled my way in. It mentions some DJ as entertainment, but also has a picture of a stage with instruments on it. The other super top-secret thing about this wedding that no one was supposed to know about and that even the photographer for Vogue had to keep under wraps was that the entertainment for the evening was actually Lady Gaga. Performing for a few hundred people, in a tent. I don't even like Lady Gaga, but I'll admit it was pretty special, especially once I was convinced that armed guards with earpieces weren't about to escort me off the premises. I don't want to suggest that all billionaire weddings are this fun, because the over-the-top gayness had something to do with it, as did the fact that most of the guests weren't the rich and famous but friends and family and other semi-prominent people from Fayette County. So yeah, I did that, and it was awesome.
This is a fun story, and I apologise for the coming less-fun response. From where I'm standing, this is the story of how you and your friends lied and abused the trust of others in order to get things you knew you weren't entitled to. Like, this is the glitzy high-class counterpart to stories of underclass black guys vaulting the ticket barriers in BART stations.
I'm not saying this just to be a miserable scold (though I probably am that) but because when people talk about rebuilding virtue in society and upholding social trust, this is what they mean. I know that you're an upstanding citizen in many ways and that you work for various nonprofits etc. as well but why are people of a lesser standing going to do the hard, thankless work of keeping up their end when they know that this kind of thing is going on behind their back? Hearing stories like this just makes people feel like suckers for holding to the rules and trying not to trouble others.
I am reminded of a quote from SSC:
On The Road seems to be a picture of a high-trust society. Drivers assume hitchhikers are trustworthy and will take them anywhere. Women assume men are trustworthy and will accept any promise. Employers assume workers are trustworthy and don’t bother with background checks. It’s pretty neat.
But On The Road is, most importantly, a picture of a high-trust society collapsing. And it’s collapsing precisely because the book’s protagonists are going around defecting against everyone they meet at a hundred ten miles an hour.
You're not that, most of the time, but it seems to me that this is a little bit of that. Especially when you’re intentionally putting staff in a difficult spot, where they may well be in for professional consequences, so that you can get what you want:
The fact that six random bozos were even able to get this close and that she briefly considered letting them in [...] meant that someone had loose lips and various heads would surely be rolling down the fairway the following morning.
Iamme
6d ago
Despite rules about writing as if everyone is reading and you want them to be included, I often see posts like these which assume no female readers. That’s one of the many reasons I mostly lurk.
But this:
Women are more hostile to COVID vaccination, perhaps reflecting a female urge to make politics revolve around their bodies.
You could just ask us. This has an answer. Or at least, I have an answer as to why I have mostly soured on the COVID vaccine and I will not be subjecting my children to it. Hint: It’s not because I want politics to revolve around my body. At least no more than men want to make politics revolve around their bodies.
It’s because ever since I “trusted the experts” and eagerly took the vaccine back in 2021, my life has been miserable for a few days out of every month. As an outcry of women rose up, the news happily reported that this was a “rare” side effect and would go away in a couple months. They basically told us to shut up about it and to stop getting in the way of the solution to COVID. It has been more than four years and I am still suffering the same as when I first got the vaccine. And I know of others in the same boat.
I don’t know of any who are speaking out publicly. That “shut up” command got through loud and clear. However, considering what it has done to some of us, I am not surprised that women tend to be more “hostile” to COVID vaccination.
I note that Bezos had a noted aversion to helicopter flight (perhaps a part a fear of flight, a part knowing the horrible safety record of personal helicopters) that he seems to have gotten over, just for this woman. To the point where he would go on longer helicopter rides just to hang out with her.
Placing your life in the hands of a woman is rare enough: placing it under IFR flight rules is singularly rare.
I don't know if you've ever been in a helicopter, but it's like putting your head next to a concert amp playing the sound of a chainsaw. No amount of plastic titties can overcome that. There are easier ways to get with a chick then that. I am inclined to believe that he is genuinely infatuated with her.
Gaashk
5d ago
I read the new ACX Review post about Alpha School (by an anonymous writer, not Scott). It was well written, but a bit of a slog, because it's quite long for an essay, but not as polished as a book. Some thoughts:
- The school in question costs $40,000/year, and the writer sent three children there last year. There were apparently only 10 children in their cohort.
- The big headline for the Alpha School model is that it has only two hours of core academics. I looked at the schedule for my local elementary school, and they have 2.75 hours of core academics. I don't think most people know this. I get the impression the writer, who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars sending three children to this elite private school and wrote a very long essay about it also doesn't know this. Forty-five minutes a day is not nothing, but is not a huge deal or the main thing the school has going for it.
- The other headline is that they progress 2.6 times faster on the state mandated curriculum, so they'll probably finish it all by junior high or so. Sure. Great. It's nice for kids to learn more things sooner.
- They have an incentive structure that appears to cost about $400 per child per year, which they earn mostly for completing their lessons well and on time, and can buy real things that they like, not extremely cheap things that individual teachers can afford to buy themselves, like at many schools. It's not impossible that public schools can adopt this, if they're convinced enough. Medicaid gives mothers points for taking their babies to checkups, which they can use in an online shop to buy books, toys, kitchen items, etc.
- The teachers are well paid ($60,000 - $150,000), not called teachers ("guides"), and have a slightly different schedule structure from public school teachers. In public schools, the art, music, PE, library, and sometimes other teachers are the only specialists, and their schedule is determined entirely by the need to provide a break to the main teachers. There's some office politics around when this "prep" happens, and how the schedules are set up. Apparently at Alpha, all the students work on the digital platform for the first half of the day, and it's not entirely clear what the "guides" are doing during that time -- students ask for individualized help from call center teachers in Brazil -- but given the pay rates, presumably they're doing something. Then they lead clubs and whatnot in the afternoon. That sounds nice, but they're paying them more than the public schools, so I wonder if there's a catch. That's a big part of the question of whether it could scale or not. Could educational assistants do what the Brazilian on call tutors are doing? Could public school teachers do whatever the guides are doing? It's unclear.
- Every public school teacher I've talked to likes the idea of morning academics, afternoon specials. This doesn't work due to the schedules of the specials teachers, and also staggered lunches. Large elementary schools have six lunches a row, and are very inflexible about that. Apparently it works at Alpha both because all the teachers are, to some extent, specials teachers, and they have less than 100 kids, so lunches are not a huge concern.
- I can see why the SSC-sphere is apparently full of well off people with gifted children, but do not personally relate all that strongly. If I were going to send my kids to a school like that, it would be for the better/longer electives and more interesting peer group, more than for the accelerated learning.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
By his description, everybody involved wanted to invade Iraq, but the dynamic that resulted in an invasion seemed to be that of the Abilene Paradox.
This doesn't really square with widely shared testimony from people like Richard Clarke, talking about the Pentagon meetings immediately after 9/11, like literally the next day:
I expected to go back to a round of meetings examining what the next attacks could be, what our vulnerabilities were, what we could do about them in the short term. Instead, I walked into a series of discussions about Iraq. At first I was incredulous that we were talking about something other than getting al Qaeda. Then I realized with almost a sharp physical pain that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were going to try to take advantage of this national tragedy to promote their agenda about Iraq. Since the beginning of the administration, indeed well before, they had been pressing for a war with Iraq. My friends in the Pentagon had been telling me that the word was we would be invading Iraq sometime in 2002.
On the morning of the 12th DOD's focus was already beginning to shift from al Qaeda. CIA was explicit now that al Qaeda was guilty of the attacks, but Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld's deputy, was not persuaded. It was too sophisticated and complicated an operation, he said, for a terrorist group to have pulled off by itself, without a state sponsor—Iraq must have been helping them. I had a flashback to Wolfowitz saying the very same thing in April when the administration had finally held its first deputy secretary-level meeting on terrorism. When I had urged action on al Qaeda then, Wolfowitz had harked back to the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, saying al Qaeda could not have done that alone and must have had help from Iraq. The focus on al Qaeda was wrong, he had said in April, we must go after Iraqi-sponsored terrorism. He had rejected my assertion and CIA's that there had been no Iraqi-sponsored terrorism against the United States since 1993. Now this line of thinking was coming back.
By the afternoon on Wednesday, Secretary Rumsfeld was talking about broadening the objectives of our response and "getting Iraq." Secretary Powell pushed back, urging a focus on al Qaeda. Relieved to have some support, I thanked Colin Powell and his deputy, Rich Armitage. "I thought I was missing something here," I vented. "Having been attacked by al Qaeda, for us now to go bombing Iraq in response Evacuate the White House 31 would be like our invading Mexico after the Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor." Powell shook his head. "It's not over yet." Indeed, it was not. Later in the day, Secretary Rumsfeld complained that there were no decent targets for bombing in Afghanistan and that we should consider bombing Iraq, which, he said, had better targets. At first I thought Rumsfeld was joking. But he was serious and the President did not reject out of hand the idea of attacking Iraq. Instead, he noted that what we needed to do with Iraq was to change the government, not just hit it with more cruise missiles, as Rumsfeld had implied.
Any stick will do to beat a dog. Dubya and his team intended to invade Iraq from the beginning, the GWOT and the absurd claims of ties to Bin Laden and the Axis of Evil and the invention of the WMD concept and the "welcome us as liberators" and madman theory and whatever else got thrown around at the time that I've since forgotten about; all that fundamentally didn't matter to the decision makers, they wanted to invade Iraq for mostly unrelated reasons. So for the rational planners further down the food chain, like the air force guys, the whole thing was confusing because the reasons they were getting for what they were doing were unrelated to the actual plan.
2rafa
3d ago
My guess is that he just fell in love with her. If he wanted to fuck 18 year olds he could have divorced his wife 20 years ago (or come to an arrangement, like Eric Schmidt, or done that classic rockstar / Larry Ellison / Henry VIII thing and just had a succession of younger wives). It seems more likely that he was relatively happy or at least comfortable in his marriage and was then seduced by Sanchez, who is no doubt a skilled and immensely ambitious operator, and then divorced his wife (likely at Sanchez’ request, and certainly as a consequence of her will given she gave her own texts to her brother who then sold them on to a tabloid) so he could marry her. There was no buffet of 20 year olds to pick from, it wasn’t like that, and the billionaires who do live that lifestyle are essentially plugged into the party circuit, big time nightclub promoters, model / escort agents and so on on the Cannes/Miami/LA/Mykonos circuit with which Bezos was not really familiar pre-Sanchez given he was a nerd who mainly attended sober economics conferences.
HereAndGone
6d ago
To Rightists with daughters reading this: are you concerned that they might encounter "natural family planning" on the internet and really f*** up their life?
I only half-scrolled through this new post so I didn't get the name of who posted it. But when I read this bit, I went "I bet this is Alexander!" and scrolled up and yep, there you were.
I don't know what to suggest, except maybe if you have a point to express:
(1) try it being about something other than 'abortion the greatest thing ever'
(2) if you really gotta 'abortion the greatest thing ever' then be upfront about that, don't sneak it in at the end of 'hey, some young women are being influenced to unscrew up their lives'?
bees suffer 7% as intensely as humans. The mean estimate was around 15% as intensely as people
Shocking. So shocking I'm calling BS. We should be arguing if one ten thousandth or one one hundred thousandth is a better order of magnitude estimate. Not 15%. Wrong order of magnitude is putting it lightly.
I'm aware of people very concerned about the very hypothetical suffering of tiny bugs including dust mites. Imagining that they have conscious awareness and suffer. Ex: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3hqXxzFRSZqRFPCTv/killing-the-ants
https://old.reddit.com/r/reclassified/comments/1kpl5ur/refilism_banned/mszshz5/
We need a term for this. Toxic empathy or something.
hydroacetylene
3d ago
Have we considered that he's in love? IDK, seems like the most plausible reason to me.
In general men on the internet have this level of paranoia about marriage that needs to be pushed back on as much as the 'OMG all men are rapists and abusers' tiktok feminism demoralizing women.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Anyone remember that whole "HBD" thing? You don't hear much about it anymore.
And then you had to go and fuck it up.
Blueberry
5d ago
Call me a dirt poor europrole, but I would rather get $480K (plus interest/stock increases) when turning 18 years old, instead of my parents paying half a million for Duolingo.
It tickles the mind though how education could be disrupted/advanced by modern tech.
Or maybe it is not so important after all? One comment on the blog claimed that Finland and Japan have similar PISA scores, despite Japan/Asia being famous for forcing children to grind obscene hours for school.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6d ago
I've seen firsthand that the "trad" lifestyle does not always work out.
I'm always a little arrested by this observation, particularly when it is offered as if in refutation of something. Have you seen a lifestyle that does always work out? If not, then surely this is no objection at all!
The grass is always greener on the other side; as always, the trick is finding the reasonable middle ground.
It seems rather to me that the trick is accepting that whatever your problems are, they are your problems, not someone else's--and are substantially the result of your own actions. Whether your own actions are, in turn, the result of some biological or cultural impetus, is a purely academic question. You can't just opt to take the good parts of trad life while never facing any possible negative results.
(Alain de Botton's Atheism 2.0 TED talk is a benighted classic for this very reason; he thinks we should find a way to incorporate all the good bits of religion into our lives, while keeping all the ridiculous nonsense at bay. It's not a terrible thought, but not only has that not worked out, I would argue that Wokism accomplished exactly the opposite--incorporating some of the worst ridiculousness of religion, without bringing along any of the tangible benefits.)
AnonymousActuary
6d ago
Thinking that someone using natural family planning within a Catholic marriage is going to be what ruins their lives is uh, an interesting conclusion
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1d ago
Congratulations! You’ve advanced from lazy, uncharitable snarling at your enemies to. Uh. Marginally higher-effort snarling at the same people.
It doesn’t look like you are arguing to understand anything. It looks more like you’re picking fights. This is an immense pain in the ass and against various rules.
One week ban.
Crowstep
2d ago
That's not why Tina Brown is criticising him though, according to Wikipedia she did exactly the same thing. She had an affair with a married man 25 years her senior. Ironically if Bezos had married a younger woman Brown might not have written the blog post, because her readers could criticise her for hypocrisy.
This looks like class hatred to me. Lauren Sanchez looks tacky and low class, with her big fake tits and duck lips. Tina Brown can't criticise her for that, so instead she insists that her sneering is on behalf of womankind, for feminism.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3d ago
socialism seems like a fair response to the complete ineptitude of our political class.
It's bizarre to me that you think the political class is inept, and you think the best response is to give them more power to screw things up in the economy.
Socialism at the federal level mostly means endlessly bloating the elder care apparatus, whereas socialism at the state + local level mostly means bribing connected nonprofits and unions to provide various crappy services that don't really work. Zohran's idea for city-run grocery stores is very dumb and will probably be dropped or completely overhauled after a few pilot programs demonstrate how silly it is.
The author (seemingly not scott) seems absolutely deranged. He outlined how he was being abused and exploited by some shitty yet expensive sjw private school yet still groveled to their admin when they vaguely threatened to kick him out for complaining too hard.
it was an invitation to grovel so our kindergartener could remain enrolled – “This meeting is not about your proposal or changing anything. This meeting is to decide if you are still a good fit for our school”
If you don't leave after hearing this, you're the school's bitch and paypig. You should never expect them to listen to or do a single thing for you ever again.
He directly says that the main benefit of his abusive provate school is that it lacks undesirables in the student body. Dude bussing is over just move to a better district using the savings from not paying insane tuition.
Then when his shitty private school was going through some changes, he wanted out, and could only say there were no good options and was thinking of staying anyways. Dude your kids are less than 10 just go to normal school.
Our oldest was going to be entering fourth grade; her incoming roster read like a rebuilding year for a professional sports team. It was possible we could get her into a middle school that would feed into a top tier high school, but those did not start until 5th grade. Our best option looked like “suck it up and accept whatever we had for at least a year”.
What the fuck, your kid is in fourth grade!!! She should be playing in the woods with other kids not training to get into a feeder school like it's the olympics!
One option was to do something radical. We considered taking a GAP year and traveling
Going to a "normal" school with "mid" teachers is sooooooo bad. Instead I'm gonna take my kids to travel the world.
Worst case, it would be a one‑year sabbatical from stagnation.
Apparently having his kids growing up in a school where a few of the best teachers quit is "stagnation". Just going to a normal school must be absolutely ruinous to all of the victims who don't have insane parents like the author.
CPS should be going after people like this for child abuse if anyone.
I think negative utilitarians have an ethical obligation to disclose this state to people at the top of everything they write so people know to dismiss their opinions.
Did you read the composting article? His logic is basically: composting is good for worms, so then they reproduce and there's more worms, and then they experience suffering which is bad, so composting is bad. If you follow this logic to its conclusion, it implies we should genocide all life forms so they can't suffer any more. And, mathematically, if your utility function literally only counts negative values and doesn't recognize positive values then this follows.
Anyone whose moral philosophy implies that we should destroy all life is either evil, or hypocritical and illogical by only extrapolating as far as it serves their current purpose. This is why my flair is "Good things are good." Because some people literally believe the opposite. If this person says eating honey is bad for bees, the largest term in his math is probably beekeepers helping bees thrive and reproduce which means more of them exist, and all the things about artificial circumstances are probably rounding errors.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
3d ago
· Edited 2d ago
Male sexuality is a lot simpler than female sexuality. Jeff could have destroyed his marriage for a nubile twenty-something with naturally big assets, but he went for tawdry 'sexy' with the trout pout and plastic boobs
I have to be careful to distinguish here between how much of my experience is idiosyncratic and how much of it can generalize, because I find the Sanchez woman to be rather repulsive, but evidently there are many men who do not.
If you listen to TRP/manosphere content, you'll frequently hear them say "men have the biggest variety of preferences, men can fall in love with anything, but women only want one thing (and that thing is Chad)". This is one of their favorite talking points, they repeat it quite often. And women often react with incredulity when they hear this, and they claim that reality is in fact the exact opposite. "What? All men just want a 'hot' woman. But my hubby, he's got a bit of a potbelly and he isn't the tallest, but he's got a great smile and a heart of gold, so I love him all the same. Obviously women's preferences are more varied and less superficial."
I think the key to resolving the dilemma is that, although the secondary and tertiary traits can vary greatly, there are certain key traits that, if absent in a man, will make it very hard for a woman to be romantically attracted to him. As far as my observations can confirm anyway. Although, pinning down exactly what these traits are is a bit difficult. It's not stability per se, nor is it social dominance per se, nor is it social adeptness per se, but rather it's more like an abstract distilled commonality that forms a part of all these traits. We might call it "agency", or projecting a sense of "in-control-ness", if not over his external environment then at least over himself. If a man can't demonstrate at least a minimal amount of "put-together-ness", then he's not going to have much luck with women.
What the TRP guys are correctly intuiting is that men have no such minimal criteria. In spite of the fact that there are clear patterns, at the end of the day they really can go for absolutely anything. There's an active 4chan thread right now where guys are swapping stories about how much they love NEET girls. As in, "whoa, you're telling me she hasn't had a job since college, AND she never leaves her room, AND she has severe social anxiety? Now that's what I'm talkin' about, I want that". You'll have to take my word for it that they really are fetishizing the status of NEET-ness itself. And they can do this with anything, rich or poor women, fat or skinny, smart or dumb, socially successful or an anxious wreck, it don't matter. Could you imagine any woman saying "you know I really just want an unemployed loser, that's what really gets me going"? If there are any such women, they're a rare breed indeed.
WhateverHappenedToNorman
3d ago
Jeff could have destroyed his marriage for a nubile twenty-something with naturally big assets
Is this not evidence for the opposite of what you're positing?
Bezos could've gotten a brain-meltingly hot twenty-something model/influencer/plausibly deniable escort. But he chose a high achieving, age appropriate woman (Who, yes, looks pretty bimbo-ish).
I do 100% believe he's on TRT, and that this affected his preferences.
anti_dan
4d ago
If you read The Idea Factory with a somewhat critical eye you can easily see why Bell labs isn't happening now, and can't happen in the near future. Sure, some of their best guys went to MIT, but that was when you got into MIT by like taking a train there then passing an entrance exam. None of this extra-curricular and AP maxxing nonsense. But many of the main figures also just were like paperboys who were the small town genius and went to a random engineering school nearby. At some point, however, determining actual merit, talent, and skill became unfashionable for academics and hiring managers so they outsourced to boring metrics and racial adjustments.
Primarily, I would be teaching my daughters their bodies and give them tools/trackers just for the educational value. There is so much more value to being aware of your cycle. It can tell a woman when she will be the most motivated, when she'll be more likely to make bad decisions, etc. Teenagers taught to monitor their bodies have reported things like, "Now I know when I'm angry at a certain time of the month, to just wait it out and not make any big decisions." Teenage girls in correctional facilities were astonished to see that their misbehavior typically fell in the same time of the month. Etc. I don't think I need to defend to this sub the value of self-knowledge.
The ideal would be that they don't have sex. But if they do, they will know exactly when and why they got pregnant.
I have a huge issue with lumping together "Symptoms-based fertility awareness ex. symptothermal and calendar-based methods". There are five different methods I can name off the top of my head that meet that criteria, which vary in effectiveness from 75% to 99.8% with perfect use. Complicating this is that a lot of people use a condom during fertile time instead of abstaining, which just makes the effectiveness on par with a condom.
Calendar-based method: Terrible effectiveness rate. I've heard of one that was just, "Have sex every 10 days" and it had an effectiveness rate of like 90%, which is funny but isn't super in-tune with the body.
Then there's the Marquette Method, which is starting to get into more measurable, technological solutions. You pee on a stick every morning, it gives you a reading you chart, the chart tells you whether or not you should have sex that day if you want to be pregnant or not.
There were forty-two unintended pregnancies which provided a typical use unintended pregnancy rate of 6.7 per 100 women over twelve months of use. Eleven of the forty-two unintended pregnancies were associated with correct use of the method. The total unintended pregnancy rate over twelve months of use was 2.8 per 100 for women with regular cycles, 8.0 per 100 women for the postpartum and breastfeeding women, and 4.3 per 100 for women with irregular menstrual cycles.
Typical use effectiveness of 93.3% is not bad at all - very comparable to the pill.
The version I use and will teach my daughters is the Sympto-Thermal method with a Doeringer rule - like the Sensiplan. I would give them special thermometers to wear at night which only need to be synced about once a week (unless you really want sex, in which case they get synced every morning.) For the Sensiplan Method:
After 13 cycles, 1.8 per 100 women of the cohort experienced an unintended pregnancy; 9.2 per 100 women dropped out because of dissatisfaction with the method; the pregnancy rate was 0.6 per 100 women and per 13 cycles when there was no unprotected intercourse in the fertile time.
This is comparable to an IUD.
Trust me, I have done the research on this. It is literally impossible to get pregnant on phase III (three days after ovulation to the start of menses), if your phase I is longer than 6 days. I've had to rely on this knowledge many a time and it doesn't fail. If I have sex anywhere near a fertile window, I get pregnant immediately (I have learned.)
Edit to add an article on the "teach teenagers to be aware of their cycle" thing: https://naturalwomanhood.org/cycle-mindfulness-what-happens-when-you-teach-fertility-awareness-to-teen-girls/
Here is what she found out: for 90% of the girls in the program who had ended up in jail, it happened during the premenstrual phase of her cycle...
One of the documented outcomes of Teen STAR’s work is the much lower likelihood for these girls to engage in premature sexual activities. The program was evaluated by ChildTrends, a leading U.S. nonprofit research organization, which reported “that this program is effective in reducing the rate of pregnancy, delaying the onset of sexual activity, decreasing sexual activity in sexually-active youth, and improving attitudes towards abstinence, compared with students in the no-treatment groups.”
Perhaps the next rich, famous man will update his priors accordingly:
“What’s the reaction from women for dating a fresh, childless young woman in her late teens or twenties?”
“Seethe, rage, accusations of you being a groomer pedophile who’s exploiting power dynamics and taking advantage of someone whose brain hasn’t even developed yet because you can’t handle a woman your own age.”
“What’s the reaction from women for marrying a middle-aged divorced woman who’s already been around the block and had her fun?”
“Seethe, rage, accusations of you being a trashy, shallow, classless bimbo-fetishist who’s too insecure to handle an intellectual woman.”
“Well then…”
A driver of the hate is that she presents as younger than she is, possibly passing as a thotmaxxing woman in her mid-to-late 40s and maybe even pre-menopausal (at least from afar). Thus, she isn’t decrepit-looking enough and is younger-looking than Bezos “deserves.” If she looks like she still might have eggs, she’s too young for the seggs.
I suppose, in general, progressive hate is likely to result whenever, wherever there’s a successful white man enjoying himself—from other tech bosses like Zuckerberg and Musk (including pre-Trump associations) to athletes like Kelce and Bauer. Modern progressivism: The haunting fear that some white man, somewhere, might be happy without benefiting women, racial and sexual minorities.
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