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Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
16hr ago
An important ingredient here is that the overwhelming majority of tattoos are just hideous. Aesthetic harm. Visual downgrade. I know of a grand total of one person whose tattoos actually look good, and I think the secret sauce is that he has only a few, and they're perfectly sized to be clearly visible and framed on his body as you would normally look at them. Most people look like either a toddler slapped stickers on them, or like a derelict wall in a shit part of down.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
17hr ago
Honestly, I used to be able to discriminate against anyone with visible tattoos, and you just...can't anymore.
I couldn't really hire contractors in some fields if I refused guys with tattoos, though I did once lose the number of an HVAC guy because he had swastika tattoos on his hands. That was a bit much. I can't really rock climb or do BJJ or crossfit comps without interacting with people with tons of tattoos. I can't get a decent cup of coffee without trusting someone with tons of tattoos. It's just not possible for me to run my life while avoiding people with tattoos, and most of them are pretty normal. So, you know, exposure therapy.
But to @ABigGuy4U 's point, there was a time when the same was said of a man without a hat.
There was a time when a wall street wealth manager could say "I'll never invest in a company if I haven't seen the head of the corporation at the Astor's ball or at the opera." And that was a pretty good, or at least a fine enough, investment strategy: only people in that sphere ran companies worth investing in, so following that social prejudice worked as a barometer of a worthwhile company. Then that time ran out, as less socially suave men ran great companies, and a manager who hung on to old social prejudices lost out.
There was a time not long ago when a wall street wealth manager could say "I'll never invest in a company if the CEO doesn't wear a tie." And that worked pretty well for a long time! Then the tech boom happens, and if you followed that social prejudice as your rule of thumb, you would have fallen way behind your competitors.
Tattoos are just another example. I used to be able to avoid anyone with tattoos. Now I can avoid people with "job-stopper" tattoos, or particularly offensive ones. But I imagine for people a step below the social ladder from me, it's tough to even avoid those people, and it becomes normalized.
naraburns
nihil supernum
20hr ago
Did I strawman the Right? Let's ask Lori Chavez-DeRemer, the United States secretary of labor:
This is exactly why we have the rule,
Post about specific groups, not general groups, wherever possible. General groups include things like gun rights activists, pro-choice groups, and environmentalists. Specific groups include things like The NRA, Planned Parenthood, and the Sierra Club. Posting about general groups is often not falsifiable, and can lead to straw man arguments and non-representative samples.
Making top level posts "responding" to specific users without using the "reply" button instead is kind of obnoxious, but this is downright antagonistic:
I expect that @RandomRanger will withdraw his claim
Don't do that. Ideally, unless you think someone would like to get an alert from you, don't @ them.
If you want to talk about what Lori Chavez-DeRemer thinks and why it is stupid, or not stupid, or whatever, like... have at! And really, there are contexts where referencing "Left" and "Right" is fine, where it would be stilted or misleading to speak differently. But you have been moderated several times in a fairly short period, mostly for antagonism, and you seem to be making kind of a hobby horse of weak manning "the Right" or some portion of it you perceive as worthy of scorn. I don't know if you're subtly pursuing a kind of consensus, or if you're just trolling, but you don't seem to be here to move past shady thinking and test your ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases.
Do better. Next time I see you pulling this, you get a ban.
There's a major difference between:
"The "Woke Rightist" looks at his race, sees a mostly imaginary mass of helpless unemployed drug addicts and demands tariffs so that they can rise to the lofty heights of sewing bras, picking fruit, hauling equipment, and digging ditches in the rain."
and "Americans are willing to do unspecified jobs that illegal immigrants do (at some unspecified but presumably higher wage)"
The former is basically an insult. The latter is vague politician opportunity and positivity speak. It's not deliberately and specifically picking out the lowest status roles. Hauling equipment, what is this, a Simpsons episode? https://youtube.com/watch?v=zTK_5Xz6X8Y&t=195
Likewise with 'skilled, up-skilled'. That's the future they envision. Some kids will be picking fruit as a summer job at a good wage - while not defrauding benefits like illegals. Then farmers will get some Made-in-America machine to scoop the tomatoes out of the ground. The kids will move onto more productive labour like making or maintaining machinery or building good houses... Whether this will actually happen is unknown but that's the idea.
And tariffs aren't even relevant here, the quote you find is about illegal immigration. Tariff 'industrial policy' may be ill-conceived and poorly executed but the goal is not to develop the lucrative ditch-digging sector. Trump and co want a revitalized US industrial sector - steel, semiconductors, assembly, machine-tools, rare-earths, manufacturing generally, petrochemicals... They dislike being dependant on foreign countries for anything and want everything made in America, even textiles and similar. Ideally in some high-tech, very productive factory like in the golden age of American industry but if not, they probably still would prefer low-tech industry to HR and 'professional services' industries or NGOs they think are working against them.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
17hr ago
I honestly don't know why some women are so stupid. Yeah, loving and devoted up to the minute he swings at you with a sword, you silly girl.
Because up until that point, they think it's hot that he could attack other people with a samurai sword, but he could never do that to them because he just loves them that much / they alone have the power to tame him / he's so emotionally dependent on them that his world would collapse without them / insert-their-preferred-framing-here.
So the hotness can win out over prudence and risk aversion.
crushedoranges
15hr ago
Let me demonstrate how irritating you're being.
"Did I strawman the Left? Let's ask Sam Brinton."
"Did I strawman the Left? Let's ask Anthony Weiner."
"Did I strawman the Left? Let's ask Jasmine Crockett."
"Did I strawman the Left? Let's ask AOC."
You are not strawmanning. You are weakmanning. You are not giving your political opposition the benefit of the doubt. I have a whole list of leftist politicians, intellectuals, and academics that have said embarrassing and stupid things I'd like you to defend, if you'd care to play at this particular joust.
atelier
Jimmys: unrustled
17hr ago
I get unreasonably angry that our justice system doesn't have exponential escalators such that by the time one is convicted of a 10th criminal charge over distinct incidents they arent sent to the gallows or an effective lifw sentence. No one needs an 11th chance, you've told us who you are by then.
DiscourseMagnus
23hr ago
I agree that the story buries the lede here, but I don't think that the "criminals" aspect is the red herring, it's obviously the part that makes it interesting; unfaithful spouses are sadly rather commonplace in this day and age. The buried lede is the pictures of children related to her, which strongly suggests, IMO, that something more sinister is going on than "mere" rampant infidelity, and casts light on the depths of the hybristophilia: she's actually trying to create as terrible of a problem as possible.
Assuming, of course, that the story's real, which is a pretty bad assumption. It could also be the storyteller trying to create as terrible of an imaginary problem as possible. But taken at face value it is the character's doing.
Scott’s cultural barber pole. When you were growing up tattoos were only worn by sailors, gang-bangers and punks. Then upper class youth started doing it and it filtered down to the respectable middle class. You still remember back when tattoos were mostly the domain of scumbags so unfortunately you end up being the old man yelling about President Kennedy’s disrespectful Brylcreamed hair. I personally don’t mind tattoos but the Zoomer broccoli haircut has me convinced that Sitting Bull Did Nothing Wrong.
ThisIsSin
Cainanites and Abelists
23hr ago
They used AR-15s, which are not, despite years of anti-gun campaigning, particularly good rifles for waging war (or insurgency).
They're cheap, good, and half the world's nations actively use them to wage war in some capacity. If that is not a good rifle I'm not sure what is.
This theory of 'more bullets = better' is not actually better in general
Yes it is[1].
that the slower rate forces better shooting fundamentals for reliability per shot
But when we're actually fighting- we're shooting at targets that are actively trying to avoid being shot at, and trying not to be shot ourselves- and not just trying to score bullseyes on a static range, we want it to be as easy as possible for us to make hits. So we're going to use the lightest feasible caliber that will defeat the target over the distances at which we expect to engage (usually less than 100 yards), and carry the most bullets both in the gun and on the person in extra magazines (traditional rifle ammunition is quite heavy and is quickly self-limiting in how much you can carry).
5.56 is special in that the cartridge weighs about the same as 9mm does (as in, the standard pistol cartridge), recoils the same as 9mm loaded to its maximum potential, but is significantly more effective than 9mm is at longer ranges because ballistics magic[2]. And its magazines are shorter so you can have more bullets in the gun without making it unwieldly.
This is in contrast to, say, 7.62x39 (the AK round), where it weighs twice as much as 9mm, recoils twice as much, magazines with comparable ammunition quantity to a 9mm rifle make the gun relatively unwieldly, and isn't appreciably more effective than 5.56 given those things because of a lack of said ballistics magic.
Note that hunting doesn't have these constraints. Neither do specialized military applications like sniping. You want overkill in those circumstances because you're not going to get another shot- the fewer holes you put in the animal the more of its tasty body is preserved (in the hunting case), and for both of them, the ranges over which you need to shoot a target that's going to spook and disappear after the first shot mean you want something that's going to give you the easiest time of that at ranges further than those typical for combat (200-400 yards).
[1] The US Army's take on "we need a rifle to shoot 800 yards" reminds me of the time the British did that. Both nations invaded Afghanistan (and lost) before adopting a rifle like this- a nation whose geography lends itself to long-range ambush-style engagements will proceed to teach militaries that fight there they need weapons with that kind of range to be standard-issue.
And to be fair to the Brits, just like the Americans, perhaps they envision future conflicts against Near/Middle Eastern or African nations will benefit from a rifle like this- places that are scarcely urbanized, with an enemy whose dominant form of mechanization is the Toyota Hilux. Against peer nations in urban warfare, though, this is not a great plan. Of course, the Americans tend to be very good at expedient engineering; the AR-15 got issued in record time while the US was at war so if they need a new rifle they'll have one quick.
[2] The faster a bullet is going the more likely it's going to fragment or change course sharply when it hits the target. Getting a similar ballistic effect from a large cartridge means a heavier projectile [not getting into why] means a heavier cartridge means heavier recoil, so you get less of the things that make the rifle good in typical combat distances.
chooky
23hr ago
If 50% tariffs have been painless
Most global trade is via ocean freight, which is fairly slow. Domestic supply chains and inventory turnaround time delay the impact further. I would consider most data on final prices to very much still be pre-tariff, especially since headline series like the CPI/PCE are still only through May. The big data tests for the tariffs implemented in April will probably be for June and July data over the coming weeks, but even then the metals tariff increases to 50% didn't take effect until June.
Crake
Protestant Goodbot
12hr ago
I would never get a tattoo and have judgements about tattoos but this doesn't really indicate that tattoos are a red flag. I mean, they are. But this goes well beyond that. There's a big difference between a tattoo of a bird on your arm, and what this person has which is the equivalent of having "I am an insane and dangerous person" tattooed across your forehead.
Back to my main point: people covered in tattoos and/or piercings are the human equivalent of aposematism, change my mind.
Does anyone who isn't a full on progressive zealot disagree with you that a person tatted up that that guy is probably bad news? I really doubt it. And the progressive zealots actually agree with you too, they know that person is bad news, they just see protecting and creating people who are bad news as a core goal.
I honestly don't know why some women are so stupid. Yeah, loving and devoted up to the minute he swings at you with a sword, you silly girl.
They're not stupid. They know that they are flirting with genuine danger. That's the appeal.
Browser
13hr ago
Can stabilize somebody at a point that's essentially at death's door but ultimately not be able to achieve sufficient resuscitation
ulyssessword
14hr ago
Bystanders desperately tried to assist the injured man as emergency services raced to the scene.
Mr Baitson was rushed to hospital for emergency surgery.
However, he died four days later.
Stranger things have happened, but dying four days after a leg wound is certainly up there IMO. I'd think you would either die in a few minutes or get enough help to recover, but maybe there's a middle ground.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
17hr ago
As a boardgamer, I can tell you that the tariffs have really fucked over a lot of boardgame publishers and Kickstarters. For those who don't know, the vast majority of boardgames are manufactured in China, and many publishers have written detailed responses to "Why don't you print in the US instead?" (The answer is "We've tried and the manufacturing facilities don't really exist here" and also "Costs will go up, not by a little but by so much that basically only people who don't care about price will buy boardgames.") Admittedly boardgames are very much a niche luxury good, but in at least a few industries there have been significant impacts.
TequilaMockingbird
Brown-skinned Fascist MAGA boot-licker
18hr ago
AlexanderTurok, You claim that you are "anti third-worldism", but if that is true, why have you consistently aligning yourself with those who are trying to make the US more like a third-world country against those who want to make it great?
It wasn't MAGA that turned San Francisco into a fecese-strewn open-air drug market. It wasn't MAGA that worked behind the scenes to put a dementia patient in the Whitehouse. And it is not MAGA that has been marching in solidarity with HAMAS, shooting at federal officers, or trying to put a Communist in Gracie Mansion. It is your "Elite Human Capital" doing all of that.
The whole "Immigrants are just doing the jobs Americans wont do" is a blatant lie. There is no industry in these United States where the majority of workers and illegal/undocumented. Not even seasonal agriculture during the height of the Biden surge. The truth is "American don't want to do those jobs for those wages" and that is what this is (and has always been) about, wages.The Plantation owners don't want to pay the help, and once again the Democrats (who have always been the Party of the Plantation Owners) are once again threating civil war if they are not allowed to continue importing and exploiting thier non-citizen underclass.
hydroacetylene
20hr ago
I have friends who were assaulted by Song at a protest in ft worth in 2023.
The use of AR-15’s doesn’t tell us anything; it’s the most common rifle in America and you can buy them over the counter at probably a dozen locations within two miles of the facility, and hundreds of not over a thousand in DFW. For an operation like that you want something semi-consistent and obtainable, even if you’d rather get some bespoke battle rifle. Likewise, black is just the antifa uniform, and any street trash is going to pick up on radios and getaway cars. All the ‘markers of competency’ mean is someone planned this, not that the planner was competent.
Building on this- the problem is what the nature of that debt, and the collapse of housing investments for future returns, implies for future economic development.
For example, the implication of the private household debt is how it shapes China's ambitions of escaping the archetypical middle income trap. The classical understanding of the cause is that a country makes good money as an export nation working the lower value chain, tries to work its way up the value chain, but the main basis of national growth (a productive low-cost but also low-income manufacturing worker class that produces exports) goes away before the worker class is able to transitions to a higher-income level of productivity that corresponds with the higher value chain. Some of the country does, but not enough (proportionally), resulting in more stagnant growth, both in terms of national economy and average wages. It's not 'bad,' but it's, well, middling. No longer economically viable for the thing that made it good.
The classical theory of how the higher income countries escaped this is that they transitioned from a manufacturing-export economic model to an internal-consumption model. The internal economics for wages and such are driven more by how the country spends and consumes within its own market, rather than how it exports to foreign spenders and consumers. Ideally, it's to some respects self-reinforcing, for the typical economic multiplication effects that let commerce grow the economy.
This was the basis of the economic question of if China would get old before it got rich. It was referring not to the country GDP as a whole, but to the wealth of the population and its ability to power a consumption-economy model. Could the Chinese public get rich enough in their economically productive years to power a transition to a consumption-based economy, before they grew so old that their savings were instead consumed in end-of-life support?
Well, that's a great deal harder for a family to contribute to if a family's lifetime of savings and investments no longer exists. Like, say, because it was invested in buying an apartment that never was built, or was built and torn down before it could be sold, or which lost its value due to the property crash.
China may yet escape that. It's unclear if the middle income trap is an issue of proportion or absolute number, in which case a proportionally small core of rich-enough Chinese could maybe drive a system. But the middle-income trap would be a lot less likely if a lot more Chinese had a lot more of their lifetime investments have a lot more value.
And, of course, if losing investments didn't contribute to the vicious cycle of ongoing deflation. Which is generally agreed to be bad, but makes individual actor sense if you recently lost much of your money but now find yourself in a position where things look like they will get cheaper the longer you refrain from buying them.
The Chinese local government debts, by contrast, are a bit 'simpler.' These are debts by lower governments, or government enterprises, that the Chinese national government is ultimately likely on the hook for. That's not a macro-economic-structure crisis, 'just' the official debt numbers being radically off and at risk of a liquidity crisis if ill-structured debts create bank runs. Which, technically, might be solved by simply printing more money and forcing the mostly Chinese holders of the debt to accept it, but...
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
3hr ago
This is kind of a boo out group post but taking it at have value:
my kid's Waldorf-inspired day care teacher has visible arm and leg tattoos. She's sweet as can be, and has two adorable kids of her own.
Plenty of people in my part of the world use tattoos to signal that they're into this archaic revival stuff to prove that they're not soulless office drones. There's plenty of legitimate jobs that aren't office work, so, seems fine.
Mihow
Lipstick on a guitar
6hr ago
When my two buddies and I were doing a film podcast, I told them that when we get to 50 episodes I’ll get a tattoo of our pod. Well about near ep 70 I was like, well shucks, guess I should keep at my word.
Now I have a lovely film themed podcast tattoo on my right upper leg.
It’s fucking cool - reminds me of my hanging with my buds - and of the 200 or so hours of content I made (that maybe seven people - including us - ever listened to).
Most tattoos I shrug at. Some are really cool. Most are meaningless - but most often then not the meaningless ones are nicer, cooler, doper, neater than the meaningful ones.
Most people look like shit anyway - from their features to their clothes … I’m not sure how much effort into caring (or hating, from the thread vibes) I’m supposed to give.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
16hr ago
I have no idea what you guys are on about, every operator type guy I ever met had tons of bad tattoos on the forearms and legs that were visible in normal casual clothing. They don't get face, hand, or neck tattoos because of military regulations, not because they are squeamish about showing off.
If anything, these guys are less likely to get into stupid fights for no real reason than the average guy because of their ability to easily keep their cool in stressful situations.
I just read American Sniper and like a good 10% of the book is dedicated to describing in great detail the bar fights that Kyle and his SEAL colleagues got into. There's an extended story about a townie bar in, I want to say Arizona?, where SEAL teams kept going for training and getting into wars with the yokels. Actually right next to the part where he talks about getting tats after his deployment.
Which again pretty much matches my real life experiences with such guys.
HereAndGone
19hr ago
Why am I (and others of an older generation) so horribly prejudiced against perfectly normal people covered head-to-toe in tattoos and piercings? Why do we cling to our outmoded beliefs that tattooing of that extent reveals low-life trashiness?
Well, cases like this, for one. Add in drugs (but of course drugs were involved) and it's a mess. Why, how can I look at the photos of this productive member of society and think to myself "that's a crazy dangerous person?"
Because he is a crazy dangerous person.
Also, while I'm at it, let me give out about the members of my own sex who hook up with crazy dangerous guys and still persuade themselves that this is the human equivalent of a velvet hippo cuddlebug pitbull who won't ever bite their own face off:
Jurors took just over four hours last month to unanimously convict Mr Scannell of the murder.
He struck Mr Baitson from behind the left knee with a sword at the Eurospar car park on Newtown Road in Cobh, Co Cork on the evening of March 15, 2024. Medical evidence revealed that such was the ferocity of the attack, the samurai sword cut through muscle, artery and bone and partially severed the leg.
... A letter from his partner, Alison Roche, was read to the court which said he was a devoted and loving father and partner.
She said her partner had battled alcohol and drug addiction issues but that everyone deserves a second chance at rehabilitation.
"Addiction is horrible," she wrote.
Mr Scannell has 11 previous convictions, one from July 2016 for assault causing harm in which he received a two year suspended sentence from Cork Circuit Criminal Court.
So let me get this straight: he's covered literally to his head in tattoos, he sells drugs, he's a drunk and a junkie, he's violent with the criminal conviction to back that up, and he just straight-up violently murdered a guy with a samurai sword over a disputed drug debt. But he's such a loving partner and father!
I honestly don't know why some women are so stupid. Yeah, loving and devoted up to the minute he swings at you with a sword, you silly girl.
Back to my main point: people covered in tattoos and/or piercings are the human equivalent of aposematism, change my mind.
Corvos
20hr ago
I think it’s fair to say that nobody proposes that Americans are jumping at the chance to do the worst possible jobs.
You have people who accept that jobs like fruit-picking and taking care of incontinent elderly people need to be automated or done by sufficiently-incentivised Americans because the alternative is endless mass-immigration as each new set of second-generation immigrants refuses to do the scut work their parents came to do.
You also have people who believe that some of the jobs being done by immigrants are perfectly decent, okay-paying jobs that Americans are being priced out of or excluded from. Semi-skilled factory labour. Coding.
I appreciate your going and looking for an actual quote but DeRemer’s phrasing is very vague. I suspect she’s talking about the latter category, and your analysis of the rest of the interview seems to confirm that. I certainly think that
sees a mostly imaginary mass of helpless unemployed drug addicts and demands tariffs so that they can rise to the lofty heights of sewing bras, picking fruit, hauling equipment, and digging ditches in the rain
is not upheld by the quote, though she may think it in private. Regardless, who do you think is actually going to do these jobs? Do you think that America can continue to rely on illegal labour to do these jobs for the next 50 years without serious consequences? 100?
Did I strawman the Right?
Yup.
Let's ask Lori Chavez-DeRemer, the United States secretary of labor:
Unless Lore Chavez-DeRemer has put on an unprecedented amount of weight in the last 48 hours, no one should confuse her for the mass of tens of millions of people that could be considered 'the Right.' The volume of space alone would be magnitudes off.
As such, attempting to use her as a proxy of tens of millions of people is a strawman, absent compelling evidence the views of those tens of millions are accurately represented by her.
The leg has massive arteries to power those big running muscles. Despite what various war and action movies might tell you, you slice one of those and you bleed out fast. That’s also why the arguments that police should be shooting to wound are laughable.
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