Aeoli off topic but what were your key takeaways from what you learned during the pandemic.
-LOADED
That’s a great question. My primary takeaway is that people will still maintain a big, maladaptive pretense even when everybody knows it’s a pretense, and they know everybody else knows, and they know everybody else knows that everybody else knows. Basically, the normies finally woke up, as the internet hoped they would for so long, and the revolution didn’t happen. Not only was there no uprising, but it just accelerated current trends, especially the totalitarianism. I didn’t even notice any ressentiment beyond what was already there due to genetically determined individual temperament.
In short, I learned that normies are 100% apolitical, genetically, and there’s no environment you can put them in that will change this, no matter how stressful or ridiculous.
Others may have learned that you can’t trust Trump, or that such-and-such group are a bunch of unapologetic psychopaths (many such cases), or that everyone around them is completely insane, but I already knew those things at the time and was spared the shock.
The most interesting part was toward the beginning where he makes the social mobility argument. The obvious retort would be that merit is primarily heritable, so maybe meritocracy already happened and the people inheriting wealth are the most deserving because they also inherited the best genes. (Obviously that opens up a discussion of whether merit = godless psychopathy.) I’d like to see that explored more. It would be necessary to show that social mobility is not higher when a society switches to capitalism. I expect it would be quite high. On the other hand, that’s likely true of any change of economic system, since it reflects a change in values which status is appraised by.
The more direct argument against capitalism is that the people it elevates to billionaire status are immoral according to Christian standards. Admittedly, in recent years the typical millionaire has been pretty morally solid (ref. The Millionaire Next Door), but I suspect this is changing quickly as we transition to an entirely fraudulent economy.
My own critique of capitalism is that its lowest-energy state, to which it must flow, is that of older generations eating the younger generations. See:
I’m just giving you permission to realize the implications you could already have guessed. Kinda late on this but I’ve been busy.
The most obvious is that Iran is specifically provoking Israel to action, because they claimed the attack immediately. Putin may be king of the world, but Israel hasn’t come to terms with that yet and will feel an obligation to retribution. As expected, wiser heads are still in charge–barely–and Israel has not immediately started a regional war. The one thing we must absolutely NOT conclude from this restraint is that Israel may accept this slap in the face with dignity and give up their perceived status as king of the world. That has never happened even once.
Therefore, taking it as granted that Israel would rather immolate itself in the pursuit of punishing Iran’s transgression than survive (and this assumption is 100% certain), the only question that remains is how they will pursue this course. There are a few easily conceivable possibilities. 1) The Jews rediscover their true power through epigenetic atavism and play the long, subtle game the way they used to. Very unlikely. 2) The Ben Gvir crowd gets off the leash and kicks off hot WW3 unexpectedly. 3) A focused increase in the sort of terrorism that characterizes regional Israeli aggression (i.e. a change in immediate priority but not in desperation). That would really work out for the Palestinians. 4) A Stuxnet-style big terrorism event like a series of truck nukes, to demonstrate Israeli authority in a dramatic fashion. This feels the most likely because they’re a dramatic people, but it will take the most time and planning. 5) Something I haven’t thought of here.
The most salient characteristic of normies, AKA women and other non-autistics, is their ability to sense their best interests in any social situation and frame the truth with the most serviceable connotations possible, and to believe what they’re saying with full sincerity as they say it. Vox Day used to say on the old Alpha Game blog that anytime a woman says something you should mentally add the preface “Right now I feel like…” to what she actually said (good advice). For example, “I will love you forever and nothing could ever change that” becomes “Right now I feel like I will love you forever and nothing could ever change that.” Children start putting a spin on the truth at a very young age to get what they want, so it’s buried deep in the developing brain.
This personality trait resides on a spectrum, which I’ve decided to refer to as malleability. A 99th percentile malleable person is able to be a racist in one social context and an egalitarian in another social context and be entirely sincere the entire time, because the weight she placed on different things she genuinely values temporarily shifted to match the audience in each context. She wants both good things for white people (tribalism) and good things for black people (egalitarianism), she just tapped into these desires differently based on the audience. This value-matching could be referred to as “empathy,” “vibing,” or “chemistry” because its subjective experience provides a sense of warmth and meaningful connection with others. It is extremely useful for social intelligence because it enables a type of mind-reading that’s based on shared assumptions.
Most people say the opposite of what they’re actually thinking as often as not because they’re leaning on these shared assumptions to provide the foundation for nuanced communication. For example, a common joke is to say something incorrect on purpose, like when I say “disirregardless”, where the assumption is that both people know “irregardless” is a common solecism and know the other person knows it. If either assumption were untrue, the joke would fail to land. The majority of communication bandwidth is lost when two people put very different weights on different values, which is at least as crippling as the absence of body language, vocal tone, and first language-level fluency. This is why highly intelligent people report the same feeling as autists that it seems like everyone else received a manual for life that they didn’t get: it’s because intelligent people have the capacity and tendency to value the future and contingencies, and dumb people put no weight on anything beyond present pleasure.
When you value the future, and other things smart people care about, as differently as this then people can become mutually incomprehensible to each other.
Our minds contain a big ledger of things we value and how much weight we put on each one: personal autonomy, social order, sex, money, chaotic bacchanalia, the economic opinions of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the opinions of your mom about how far you could have gone in school if you’d really applied yourself, and on and on. Unless they’re autistic, people keep these weights under lock and key and only share them with the people they trust the most, because these weights are the fulcrum by which people are manipulated. 80% of social intelligence is developing the skill of discerning these values in other people, and 80% of charisma is sticking a lever in those fulcrums and applying just a touch of force. (Again, we immediately think of the sociopath who said he perceived of people as having “handles” that he could use to turn them this way or that.) Similarly, I’ve described the art of interpreting geopolitics as depending entirely on knowing what the “sides” of a conflict are and empathizing with what they actually want.
Therefore, you’d expect people who go into intelligence work to be of the theater kid temperament, comfortable with trying on different value systems (different weightings) along with donning different costumes. There’s no appreciable difference between method acting and going undercover.
Malleability also correlates with tribalism and emotional range (AKA neuroticism) because it serves a similar purpose for navigating complex social dynamics. I suspect it’s half the reason psychopaths target narcissists, who are exceedingly sensitive to expressions of social approval and disapproval. (The other half would be the lack of tribalism, because tribally inclined, instinctive people don’t turn on their people easily and just shut down and do nothing if their instincts were pitted against their need for social approval. Autists lack tribalism but also lack malleability.) It’s orthogonal to stubbornness, which can be triggered to manipulate stubborn people who are also highly malleable.
The simplest and easiest way to detect how malleable a person is is to observe the different levels of emotion with which they express social disapproval, depending on how safe they feel expressing their opinions in different social contexts. This is a good indication of how much effortful control they’re exerting to regulate their emotions to socially appropriate levels, which isn’t quite the same thing as feeling different emotions entirely but closely related (also related: levels of belief). It’s also strongly related to fantasies about bullying/torturing people to reinforce social values, because highly malleable people recognize malleability in others, possibly overestimating its influence on on other people’s opinions via projection. The connection between false confessions and brainwashing as outcomes of torture could be explained by the human tendency to believe our own bullshit, even the bullshit we say under duress, and then stick to it stubbornly. As you might guess, malleability would also be the cause of Stockholm Syndrome–and probably also fibromyalgia, which is caused by misinterpretation of pain sensations and a false belief in what “normal” should feel like–and would explain why these are almost exclusively female phenomena.
Now I’m curious: can you think of a functional reason for the absolute dominance of touchscreen UIs in the last ten years? As in a good reason for them to exist, other than the Star Trek phenotype.
it’s the sort of thing that feels easier to use, even if it isn’t i suppose that’s not exactly a functional reason
and now that i think about it, i’m not even sure that it requires less fine motor control than a mouse it does make devices themselves less clunky
That’s the one I thought of, it’s easier on manufacturers to not have that slide-out keyboard with the ribbon cables.
and i wonder if it saves on manufacturing compexlity
But I think if people had demanded those, it would have won out. What they wanted, 100% for certain, was iPhones. Now every fuckin’ electronic UI device is an iPhone.
ha, we’re son the same page
Remember back in the day when I got heavy into computers after being heavy into aesthetics, and I mentioned that I started seeing things in the world as objects with associated properties and action prompts? There’s the normal, concrete, visuospatial way of seeing things in the world, and there’s the way of seeing things which mimics video games like Skyrim. If you look at a chair in Skyrim a little prompt comes up that says “Wooden Chair – Press A to Sit”. And if you use your imagination a little, you can imagine how it would look in the map builder if you clicked on the chair and a box pops up with all its properties: its X, Y, and Z coordinates in the room, the name of the texture finish on the 3D model, its weight, that kind of stuff. That’s how I was seeing things like trees and grass. If I looked at a tree I’d almost see the prompt saying “Press A to climb”. I think it’s impossible to play video games with any amount of immersion and not start thinking about ways real life can be simulated in a game or vice versa.
this makes me thing of your psychopath’s example of looking at people and seeing the handles
Yeah, exactly right.
“Press A to make them get you a cup of coffee. Do the konami code to make them go streaking”
Actually, that observation may help me to make the last jump I need.
i do wonder if this is part of the reason some people seem so taken by the simulation argument of reality
It absolutely is. Just like how everybody 400 years ago wanted to think of the universe as a big clock. Newton spent his life inventing calculus just so he could prove that.
too much in the vidya and no familiarity with any of the philosophy on the matter makes for a dangerous combination
I’m sure there are similar reasons for materialism and other surprisingly sticky philosophies that are incredibly shallow and facile from the outside. Nihilism would be another good one. If you aren’t enchanted by the idea, then you can dispel it in a three-line syllogism. Why does it stick? Degenerate living, every time.
if stuff real why think hard? don’t look a gift horse in the mouth man
The intuition that the touchscreen aesthetic is human instrumentality, in the End of Evangelion sense, kinda came out of nowhere after reading this quote:
“Increasing focus on the magic world of touchscreens fosters a near religious belief in the power of technology to solve all human problems.” -Frank Wright, Taxis and Takeaways
(I think he’s observing a correlation rather than a causation.) It springs from the same sort of childish personality that wants everything in life to be an app with a single button and a misspelled name with all lowercase letters. Whereas grown men are generally repulsed by these aesthetics. The observation about psychopaths seeing people as having “handles” maps well to the observation that touchscreens present a limited range of options to the people using them, with all the inner workings obscured and abstracted away from their vision. When you sit in a pilot’s cockpit you have the sense you’re working with a complex machine that you ought to understand so you can work with it in tandem, kinda like partners in a working relationship. The app people would look at all those buttons and think “we should just have one button to turn on the autopilot”.
So the touchscreen aesthetic is like game design–on one side you have someone designing the experience with all the knowledge and power, and on the other side you have someone consuming the experience passively with no desire to engage critically. As the app developer you’re making the button that “just works”. It’s not (yet) quite pressing a button to make people streak, but it’s giving them a button they can press to go streaking. (Add a staff of psychologists to then make them go streaking if you’re Facebook.) On the economic side, there’s an obvious assumption that everyone is extremely specialized. You hyperspecialize in making one kind of app button (maybe a “fix my car” app), and you don’t bother knowing about anything else because there’s an app that takes care of it for you.
People are reduced to the one function they supply with a perfect user experience and no fuss (or else they’re driven out of existence by bad Yelp reviews), hence Human Instrumentality. Basically, if you can’t even find a market niche to develop an innovative app, become a millionaire, and afford the rent to live in San Francisco away from the street shitters, then you’re not fit to live. The future only has room for tech CEOs and the bare minimum number of Filipino slaves still necessary to change their diapers in meatspace.
The most concise expression of the touchscreen aesthetic: it’s the reduction of human experience to user experience design.
Coders are so unbelievably bad at estimating the time and cost of a project that it deserves comment. This incapacity scales up so that the better a guy is at coding, the worse he is at telling you how long it would take to expand the kitchen or organize a new 5k race (NB: girl coders, insofar as they exist, are probably immune to this deficiency). Take Texas Arcane as the archetypal example: he’s breaking new ground in embedded systems, and his operating system has been coming out next month for the last 25 years.
NB: Almost everybody is bad at estimating unless they’ve made a concerted effort to learn it, but programmers are much, much worse than their IQs would predict.
It appears to be caused by the nature of the work itself, just speculating. In most areas of life, mistakes in the little details average out–a carpenter often doesn’t sweat a quarter inch here or there. But in computer programming, the very first thing you learn in practice is that one syntax error breaks everything, and as a profession we have a level of paranoia that strikes most outsiders as alien. Sure, they would understand the average level of quality assurance when it’s surgery robot control software, but the idea of writing tests for a podunk little corporate CRUD app that nobody cares about is beyond them.
So I suspect this tendency to treat every single detail as being just as important as every other detail carries over from spending all day thinking like this. There’s simply no way to predict when a habitual perfectionist is going to be satisfied with any given detail. I think people, in general, severely underestimate how much impact your current job and the attendant activities have on our psychology. Think back to those times when you changed from a bad job to a good job (or vice versa) and see if you can recall how it even changed the posture of your shoulders while you were at home.
So there I was, surrounded by admirers and babes as I got into the power rack for my last set of squats. I was fatigued all to hell and scared out of my mind because this set was the closest to 50/50 odds I’ve ever been (as you’ll see in a moment). Even knowing the safety pins are there, the idea of your leg muscles failing under four hundred pounds and unbalancing forward or backward as it crushes you into an indeterminate final position is intimidating. But I’d done my pre-squat ritual, I’d done a long rest between sets, and it was in the training plan. So I got under the bar and did four perfect reps, then took three big breaths and dropped into the hole for the last one. Rebounding, I found myself in the sticking point just above parallel for a full five seconds. Long enough to start wondering if I should exhale and try for another breath (never do that BTW), and my vision was starting to go black in the periphery. Normally when I’m in the sticking point on my fifth rep I tell myself “It’s just cardio”, but this was getting ridiculous. A simple thought crossed my mind: “This is the rep of a lifetime.”
I felt a slight shift in the way my burning hamstrings were contracting, like they’d shifted into a lower gear, and the weight started to go up very slowly. It was an intense fight, and I was still racing against the loss of oxygen, but when the weight starts to move it’s like seeing the morning sun in a zombie movie. You know, somehow, you’re going to make it. It was a peak moment and no one can ever take that victory away from me. One of the reasons for this post is I like to have these moments written down for later, when I’m feeling down from all the things that don’t just depend on me. No HR lady, no intelligence agent, and no rightoid AMOG can go back in time and change what happened. They can erase me and my kind from the history books, but they can’t make the history not have happened. It was the perfect struggle and I won. Praise the Lord for making the past immutable, we all have regrets but it sure beats the alternative.
Oh, I almost forgot to mention the first part about all the fans and babes was a joke, there were only four people in the gym in opposite corners, as far away from each other as we could have been. It was a very modern experience that way. The rest is true though. That’s just the way I like to tell the story in person, usually with a sweeping arm gesture: “SO THERE I WAS…”
I’d like to focus in on the affirmation that popped into my head, “This is the rep of a lifetime.” You would need to be intimately familiar with my inner thought life to understand why that’s like poetry to me, but the exact reasons it hits aren’t important. It’s impossible to really predict which images and sayings are going to hit because it’s bound up in random memories, unconscious archetypes, the cultural products you consumed when you were going through puberty, racial memories, and the sorts of things you dream about when you’re asleep. What’s interesting is the ability of our brains to produce these holistic, performance-enabling thoughts and images spontaneously, and more often when we’re operating at an emotional intensity beyond conscious comprehension. Something that feels profound will pop into our heads to “explain” everything about the current situation, maybe a little movie or mythical short story or simply a vision of a shining golden wheel in the sky, and it’ll only make sense in retrospect how it actually represents many things at once. This is probably why poets experience intense emotional states more often than others, and why they seek out intense experiences of a particular type when they need a particular sort of inspiration. These holistic ideations form the core around which professional technique can fill in the gaps, like a Romantic-style architect shaping a landscape to emphasize a striking natural centerpiece.
You’re probably familiar with the idea that high-level performers have little superstitions that they cling to, like a professional baseball player who has to wear his lucky pair of underwear in high-pressure games. You may even be aware that studies indicate these superstitions do, in fact, create a small but measurable increase in performance. I propose that this is the same phenomenon: superstition serves the purpose of passing executive control from the conscious mind to the subconscious so it can engage in highly coordinated action with its greater holistic comprehension of both the situation and the mind’s inner state. You can observe this in yourself by inducing a pseudo-schizophrenic mood, whether with magical realism media that is designed to induce it or by simply looking for omens in everyday things (ever get the idea that God is happy or upset with you based on whether you’re hitting red lights or green? it’s like that). Try it, and observe how it affects the muscle tension in your body. You’ll find that you’ve entered that calm sense of urgency that characterizes periods of extremely productive work. I’ve begun to believe that a calm, well-balanced sense of urgency and focus are the same thing.
This is clearly adaptive in certain circumstances, most notably those involving anticipation of complex social dynamics and coordinated physical action, and maladaptive in other circumstances, most notably those involving verbal-symbolic reasoning, unfamiliar technologies, and counterintuitive phenomena in the natural world. It is also clearly associated with the fast-life history strategy, because we find schizophrenic ideation more often in Africans, dark triad artists/writers, and the ancient world. This would also explain the frustrating tendency of religious institutions to be either transgressive and reasonable or traditional but superstitious to the point of actual retardation. Why can’t I find a church with healthy young families that don’t use their Bibles like Ouija boards? Because apparently church is one of those areas where holism beats analysis and coordinated activity outweighs isolated specialization.
In other words, maybe people have to actually think communion is a magic spell the priest is casting on the bread and wine to attend church regularly, even if that’s silly. And yes, that means you’ll need to be constantly reminding people that divination is bad.
Noble ladies had their Virgil clubs, and injected mysterious meanings into his words, even as now they sometimes deal with Robert Browning. The “Æneid” was used to conjure by, and in the time of Hadrian fortunes were told by the Sortes Virgiliana, or by seizing upon the first word that presented itself ad aperturam libri, just as the Bible is used by some superstitious people to-day. As the Latin language gradually was displaced by the popular corruptions of it, it came to be regarded as a mystery, both in church and school. To the vulgar, “hoc est corpus” became “hocus-pocus.” A magical efficacy was attributed to learning. Friar Bacon and Dr. Faustus alike, when they dived too deeply into science, were thought to be in league with the devil.
Was going to toss out book recommendations (Shogun, Tai-Pan, and Noble House by James Clavell…which I know i’ve recommended before several times) in line with your “be mroe charismatic” goal, but they’re more “confrontational characters winning by charisma and guile” than directly “be more charismatic” Still, might be good general abckground for the charisma thing
Yeah, it sounds like exactly what I’d want. I can get the “be more charismatic” thing from the books that say how to do it. It’s like the difference between Pilgrim’s Progress and Lord of the Rings. I’d rather read the latter. (I still like to reread the former, just not as often.) What else you got? Books-wise.
I really need to read the former. It’s on my to-read list hmmm…
I recommend Pilgrim’s Progress. The sequel, which no one’s heard of, is best if it’s lost to history.
hehe for general charisma type things i think i’d recommend the same thigns as everyone else (i.e. how to win frieneds and influence people, that sort of thing)
Feelings on Robert Greene? I suppose I can make a quick list of what I already intend to go through…
i was minimally impressed with robert greene when i read him years ago. i have to imagine i’d find it utterly trite and banal now, and bad advice to give to people who are just trying to get alittle more out of life lol, beat me to it it’s been a few years since i’ve read ‘The Gervais Principle”, but i have to imagine it still holds up well
That’s more social intelligence though, I already have that.
Verbal Judo is decent
How to Win Friends and Influence People The Charisma Myth Mystery Method
i think there’s a 90 minute youtube video that’ll get you all the same concepts in less time
Probably go back through that negotiating book Boneflour likes. “Get to No” or something like that. “Start with No”
i’m trying to get the generic advice books out of the way while i think of good literature
Think TV and movies too, that’s what Patrick used to recommend for this. Except he was trying to teach me class at the time, not charisma. Sorta “intro to melonhead” type stuff, heavy on sensitivity, crime, and social dynamics.
not quite the same thing, but they both help the other. you don’t need to think of them as being all that seperate
What I need now is just practice talking like Trump.
lol
Actually, it occurred to me I might try Omegle for that. Plus I hear you get to watch a lot of guys jacking off. I dunno if they cleaned that up at all.
i can’t imagine they would why eliminate your raison d’etre? i would also suggest thinking of speaking like a spectrum, with Trump being “how to talk to large crowds” and (insert well-spoken genius aristocrat) being your one-on-one with your spot on the spectrum being dictated by how many people you’re engaging with
I can do one-on-one once it gets going, I just need to build up some canned material. It comes naturally when you talk to a lot of people for short periods, I had a stable of jokes and lines when I was in the drive-through window. It really is just practice. Maybe I’ll write a book on it, that would keep me engaged. Just simple stuff like “If a guy is dumb, ask him about sports, and just keep asking questions.” I suppose it would be video games for the younger crowd. Hey, here’s a good question: What’s the equivalent advice for talking to girls? I assume it’s talk about their life history, right? I’ve heard “talk about travel” but that one trips me up because it’s going to come out eventually that I detest travel. Maybe movies and aesthetics would be a good one, something like “can you recommend a really pretty movie,” and then ask followup questions.
Yeah, interests is a pretty good one What kinds of tv shows, book, movies…whatever they like
There are a lot of young women around here so I have opportunities to try out some openers.
the slighty more socially attuned version is “What are you watching/reading right at the moment?” it comes off as less canned
Yeah, plus people love talking about that.
the flip side is then you’ll need to be able to talk about harry potter spin-offs, Bridgerton, whatever is hot on netflix…etc
Mm, maybe not. If they require that in a boyfriend it’s a disqualifier anyway, but I can still survey for overlaps in interests.
“Would you say there are any books that had a big influence on you?” is related and will probably give you a better sense of intelligence/thoughtfulness
That feels like late rapport stage. Am I right or wrong about that? Feels like a first date question.
it’s the sort of thing you’d have to let naturally follow from some previous questions, but it works early on oh, throw music in this category as well
I was just thinking about that.
“what kind of music do you lsitn to”
It occurs to me that’s a great lead-in for a neg.
“Are you a big swiftie?”
“Yeah, you strike me as a swiftie.”
“Oh you are. Cool. my sister/sister-in-law/cousion/inssert whoever it doesn’t matter is as well and she got crazy into blah blah blha ramble on abotu nonsense” yep, lol Leaad off with that before plowing on about how some relative or whoever just got so into taylow swift all of a sudden and it’s crazy how popular she is now but you secretly like some of her songs
I don’t know any of her songs. I’m like my dad when it comes to music, I have my playlist of 30 songs and that’s what I listen to (and they’re all metal). All of my actual tastes are charisma-killers, but I can talk about matters of taste with some charisma.
Oh, there are some other metal covers of her songs I already like, that’s a good point. Metal covers of pop songs are often excellent, I think we’ve talked about that before.
Yeah, go with that lol. And then frame it to “my whoever keeps trying to get me into her…do you think i should do it?” it’ll make it sound like a game…how do i get this guy into T-swift? “Oh, I should do it? Okay, what songs should I lsiten to?” all these steps are great for movies and tv as well “Oh, should I watch it? Ok ,what’s good about it?” “I’ve got some friends that think xyz is great and others that don’t. What do you think?” and yes, i think we did talk about that once
I can’t help but observe that PUA appears to be making a comeback. For the last 8 years it became uncool and receded into the background as something “everybody knows” but it’s low-status to talk about it. Since Trump.
Is it?
In the sense that you’re allowed to talk about it on the internet again, yeah.
gotcha the zoomers are discovering sex again?
No, but they’re graduating from college and entering the desert.
Ah
During the Nazi podcast period PUA talk was frowned upon, then during the Biden years everybody was respecting wamen again because the cycle of history meant we were going to win, but the actual stats are finally breaking through.
Well that would do it
I still see the Nazi-sphere resisting the idea that there’s a problem, but they’ve lost a lot of their influence.
not sure if i would have called this development but we’ll see how it progresses think we’ll see the strange excesses of people actually putting on funny costumes and walking around LA or do we think it’s going to be a lot of “red pill”/PUA advice going around tiktok?
The latter, for sure. Top G material.
oh, yeah. in that sense. lol i’m trying to figure out if this violates my “boomers and millenials as externally-focused’ and “gen x/zoomers as internally-focused” model
Gen Z aren’t internally focused, they’re just extremely socially anxious. Gen X are actually very concerned with proving their narcissistic personas to themselves more than to other people.
lmao
I’m scrolling through things looking for a graph. You can take off if you want.
eh, i’m interested in the return of PUA under the zoomies it’s kind of amusing to me
This would be a great graph for the retards still giving the “go to church” advice. If they could learn, I mean. They’re pretty impervious to stats. It’s insane how far you can go with just the No True Scotsman fallacy in the fertility rates discussion. “All the REAL good people are blah blah blah…”
Not sure if i trust those particular numbers, but that is the trend i’ve seen documented elsewhere what i want to see is numbers nor jsut for couples, but for MARRIED couples i want to see if there’s a difference all the good people are just trying to follow the social conventions, the same as has always been done
The number of young people getting married is microscopic, it would be very difficult to get a good sample.
eh, start with the local/county marriage bureau and work from there every marriage has paper trail and legal records Not sure if that’s how we have data for things like “median age of marriage”, but if not, that jsut proves there’s at least one other way to get data
I suppose I meant for amateurs, a professional researcher could do it if any of them could be arsed.
ah, fair lol yeah, amateurs are stuck with their own social context for who gets married and who doesn’t
And if you ever want to see why the right is useless, just try showing them a graph about fertility rates. You’ve never seen such self-righteous bloviation. I should make a Bingo card for it. “Not my problem” “I don’t believe those numbers, everyone I know is…” “All the survivors will be Republicans” “Pendulum of history” “WINNARZ” “We just need to kill all the Millennials” I’m bored of complaining, I really want to find this other graph.
the foolish will always be with us
The problem is I think it got censored all to hell on the search engines. It basically shows the number of female virgins dropping like a rock and hitting the zero line around 2018 with a trajectory like an airplane nosediving into the ground. It’s very difficult to see it and argue that there are still a bunch of really high-quality girls out there if you just believe hard enough. This is important because you have to start talking about maybe, someday, just nudging women a little bit to act different. Instead of, you know, nagging young men to man up.
Here’s one that would show it if it were extended:
the jump in 10+ partners is pretty impressive. that’s the line i’d most liek tog et he msot recent data for i guess the practical, useful concern is where young men go from there
I wish it were a question of where old men go, because they’re the ones who should actually be fixing it for the young men.
my hot take is that if two people have a roughly equivalent number of partners than their lifestyles are compatbile
Which is why it’s a desperate situation that 40% of 25-year-old men are virgins and 0% of 25-year-old women are virgins. “This includes determining the average number of sexual partners that men and women have across the U.S. and Europe. For the entire sample group, it was determined that women averaged 7 sexual partners while men averaged 6.4. Interestingly, the average number that people indicate as an ideal amount of sexual partners is incredibly close to this average, with women averaging 7.5 as an ideal number of partners and men averaging 7.6.” https://allthatsinteresting.com/study-sexual-partners
yeah, that plus the preference for a more educated and higher-earning man when men are falling behind on those fronts really illuminates the amtter
And what kills me is NOBODY GIVES A SHIT. They’re all rooting for the young men to lose because they never stop for a second to think about it. “The WINNARZ will WIN” not if nobody has kids they won’t! You can’t make a new generation with 10% of the young women reproducing! It doesn’t work! Why am I the only person who perceives this as an emergency?
in the sexual market, everyone is a boomer. “i got mine, if anyone else has a problem that’s their problem”
Yeah, that’s 100% it. It drives me up the fuckin wall.
you’re not alone. it’s a sign of tremendous societal issues when there is material prospoerit and a healthy culture, people reproduce. if they are not reproducing, at least one of those ahs gone wrong we know both have gone wrong in the US but relationships are falling apart as well of course, no one wants to complain because it makes them look like a loser
Worse, they don’t want to admit a problem exists because it might mean things aren’t going to turn out great unless somebody changes the way they do things. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA I finally found it.
It’s actually worse than I thought. The number of celibate women post-college is so far below 1% they may as well not exist, which raises the question WHERE WERE THE ADULTS? Where are they now? Stroking themselves in their armchairs, is where.
encouraging it because kids should have a good time, like we did back in the day ok, i had fun, now how can i best prepare myself for a relationship? that’s ok, you’ll find someone, it’ll happen, don’t worry about it not like part of being in a relationship and genuinely trying to build a life with someone requires making choices fomr the perspective of investing in a relationship and trying to make it work even when it’s hard
We’re going to go extinct and we’re going to deserve it. I can’t even tell if I’m just venting frustration when I say that.
side tangent, most PUA advice really is terrible for actually building any kind of long-term relationship because it’s optimized for standing out when you have absolutely no social context whatever (from being in a job, church, social group…etc)
E.g. costumes.
>”don’t apologize” >yeah, to some weirdo in the club, terrible advice when you’re living with someone and trying to merge your souls into one union
What, you don’t make your wife buy your drinks? Simp.
>your wife will leave you if you don’t make her buy you drinks >okay bachelor
Maybe we should make a line of “Okay Xer” memes because that sounds like actual Xer advice. A Boomer would tell you all women are queens, right before a shouting match with his wife for not closing the screen door all the way, then getting his fourth divorce. People are weird, man.
>don’t simp, not even for your wife >ummm, the point of a wife is you selected someone worth the devotion
Humans were a mistake. Gas homo sapiens, neanderthal foot worship NOW! New blog tagline.
lol well, that was a marathon session
Yeah, and that feels like the right place to quit. It’s hard to make an organic segue from the neanderthal foot worship line.
my thinking is we get back to this next time with a bit mroe energy and hopefully a couple dieas
Yeah, it would be nice to make it presentable for the people. Our goal is to fix sex and present the solution in a clean, engaging package. Should take about an hour.
The thing I was thinking about, while sitting there missing my appointment time, was actually a followup topic from last week. I was reflecting on how the church has completely dropped the ball on the fertility crisis thing, as we have on every other topic that actually matters to people’s lives today. Various things have been tried, and even more fantasyland proposals have been suggested on the internet. [Censored] is, right this moment, at a singles retreat weekend for Russian Orthodox singles. Nothing against him or the Russian Orthodox or anybody in particular, but that’s not how you get average people married off. Fantasyland proposals include such ideas as going to old people church, making friends with the old ladies, and then marrying one of their granddaughters or nieces or something. We said we were going to fix this problem, right? As a joke but also serious.
All it requires is a cultural overhaul and significant economic restructuring But harder things have been done before What we do have going for us is that, generally, people are strongly inclined to pair off and have kids and where there’s a will, there’s a way
I disagree, I think part of the problem is this is a medium-weak inclination. Doing nofap has taught me that most of the benefits people talk about are copes. The real reason to do nofap is because masturbation takes away your interest in the opposite sex. It’s why I’ve been okay with being single for so long, it just wasn’t a pressing issue because I was getting off every night. You just get used to that routine.
I’d say that if my experience is colored, it’s by predominantly associating with people either in long-term relationships, already married, or transitioning from the former to the latter Probably a “like finds like” kind of thing and agreed. release of desire saps desire
A big part of nofap is you want to have sex with anything that’s got a hole, like a 15-year-old, whereas if you’re masturbating regularly your standards for being attracted to someone go up 4 points. There’s no danger of getting stuck in the vacuum of your pool filter like a teenager is wont to do. (Sure, an ideological coomer might end up doing that, but most single, celibate men view the release as a chore like going to the bathroom.) Even if we take this into consideration, I think many celibate men would still pair up with women if it were a straightforward checklist and they believed it was their duty. Fewer maybe than if fapping were somehow made impossible, but still enough to run a society.
On the other side of the equation, I disagree that women feel a strong desire to match up and reproduce until they’re hitting the wall, for approximately the same reason. Again, they’re only interested in men 4 points up because they’re pursuing the marriage feelings (of security and approval from authority) through masturbatory activities like grad school and career. I’d describe the desire as medium-weak.
What I have noticed is that in women, babies go from objects of befuddlement to objects of curiosity around twenty and objects of interest around 25 i would say that suggests a growing desire agree that relationships are about a feeling of secuity and approval
Sure, I’d propose the graph of desire looks like a quadratic function. But it also peaks way too late to be useful for pairing off average women. We can see this in the statistics. If it were true that female desire peaks early enough to get married, they would be getting married at much higher rates and we wouldn’t have the spinster crisis.
where you do get earlier marriage it’s in places where the cultural and social pressure to do so is stronger (i.e. the South)
32ish is where you start seeing the desperate blog posts.
lol
I’d use that as a critical marker of “admitting you have a problem”. And that’s too late to start solving the problem for your standard HB5.
admitting always lags behind acknowledging, and the bigger the problem the more that lag is expressed in years
Here are the variables in the (not) dating equation that are causing serious trouble:
Lack of exposure
Lack of overwhelming desire (as we just discussed)
Lack of practice and cultural clarity about how to do the courtship dance (on both sides)
The biggest problem in dating, by far, is the fact that society is de facto segregated into niche interest groups. When I was living in the Detroit area I could go weeks and even months without ever seeing a bachelorette. The internet advice to “just go up and talk to her!” has been laughable post-Covid. Go up and talk to who? The big question I’ve been asking re: PUA since 2018 is where do you even go to practice? Answer: Hobby Lobby.
What?
The simple fact is girls stick to their little interests and boys stick to their little interests and they RARELY encounter each other, after college. This is the biggest problem to be solved.
Clearly this is a geograhic difference
Somewhat. You’re going to find this is true in most places where people move around for economic reasons (which is most places, period).
i don’t think i’ve ever lived in such a place with a dearth of sinlge women i see what you’re saying now…sex segregation based on different interests/behavioral patterns
I’m not surprised that you haven’t encountered this issue, I don’t think most people living in relatively successful areas, demographically, have any familiarity with it. It’s not that men and women don’t live in geographic proximity at all, it’s that they don’t see each other in public.
ok, i think that feeds int0 #3
Yeah, that’s a big part of it. The rest is just that everybody lives in their little niche subcultures and nobody knows what the real rules are anymore. Women who read trad-Catholic Twitter are going to have completely different ideas about how the dance works than women who read romance novels. What are the chances that trad-Cath Twitter girl is going to run into trad-Cath Twitter guy IRL and they’re going to have the same ideas about how the dance works? Effectively zero. You’ll have better chances with romance novel girl and pick-up artist guy, but even then it’s still pretty low chances, and there are other problems with that scenario. (Pick-up artistry is basically romance novel LARPing.)
so everyone defaults to apps and online dating
Right, which we’ve seen doesn’t bridge the gap, IMO because of the lack of exposure problem.
which don’t seem to be very good at actually filtering for compatibilty
Which brings up a subpoint, you can’t just transport people to a singles weekend and expect that to turn into marriages. They need to be around each other consistently for at least a week or two.
and are also suspect because they have commercial incentive NOT to actually pair people off but instead to keep them on the treadmill
I hadn’t thought of that part.
i wouldn’t peg it as any kind of major reason for the death of relationships, but it’s something to note
But I suspect it’s true of our society in general. I think most people actually prefer things the way they are, as long as all the single people die quietly. Part of this is the segregation. To people who are married, it looks like everyone worth a damn is married. Sort of like how you never run into anyone with a sub-120 IQ. That’s equivalent to only being around 8s. These are people who are actually attractive to each other because they compare well to pornography and career prestige. The social problems are affecting them way, way less than the average. It’s like the effect of immigration on wages, if you only know people in the top 10% of the IQ scale you’d be tempted to think it’s not as devastating as the statistics suggest. “Just move to Singapore”, that kind of thing. It’s like, homie, I work at Applebees.
My serious theory is that online dating gives you someone who might look interesting for a first date but has a low porbablity of matching you with someone with whom you have a compatible lifestyle and grounds for shared growth together and yes, successful monogamists tend to find each other and clsuter together
There’s also a lack of social context for the courtship process. You could just not tell anybody and no one in your life would know you have a girlfriend. Traditionally, you’d be courting in the context of a village where everybody knows both parties.
well, unless you start taking her to things but if you aren’t already engaged in mixed-sex activites, where to take her?
you probably aren’t going to disrupt all-male activities unless this is your first relationship and you’re making a rookie mistake
What mixed-sex activities are there, even? Genuine question, BTW. For my own dating efforts.
well, that’s the thing…either there ARE mixed-sex activities going on or there aren’t. apparently dances, outdoor music festivals, industry events, whatever events local social/cultural organizations host don’t suppose you could trawl meetup or whatever for thigns like swing dancing clubs, hiking clubs…etc?
I dunno, I bounced off Meetup a couple years ago but I could try again. This is where my introversion sabotages me. I don’t know much about how people make their social lives happen. Plus being cheap. My social life back in the Detroit area entirely revolved around people at the [fitness club]. That was a mixed group. Funny story about that, actually. I asked two of the girls there out and they both disappeared from the club forever. One was immediately, and the other was one of the trainers who got a new job. After that I was a lot more circumspect, I didn’t want to make trouble for the owners by driving off all the young women. (The trainer was probably going to leave anyway, but the other one was definitely because of me.) (Better not to have a reputation, in any case.)
i sometimes suspect introvert social life is mostly a function of their extrovert friends dragging them along to things until they get hooked on something fun in and of itself ah, that’s a fair question – which types of activities lend themselves more towards being open to potential romantic interactions?
Ooh, I know this one. I read it in a book.
alternative question: which ones are best at making sure both parties have the same intention and are speaking the same romantic language?
That would be culture-affirming activities like going to the same church. Especially if they run a class that says “This is how you court the opposite sex”, which by the way none of them do.
that would do it or at least, be fertile ground i can’t imagine any org explicitly trying to run classes like that nobody wants to talk about dating as a process/skill that needs to be developed but…it is plus giving people physical and pscyhological room to come out and express interest without fear of upsetting the social group
“”” The romantic love system is not magical and can be “tricked.” More than twenty years ago, psychologist Arthur Aron famously tried to manufacture love in a laboratory setting. Participants from the experiment not only fell in love, but they ended up getting married. Aron demonstrated both that love can be created just by exposing people to a specific set of stimuli and that social pressures to marry who you love are so strong, people will end up marrying someone just because they love them—even when they consciously know the love they experience was created under laboratory conditions.
Romantic love appears to be triggered by:
Complexity: The complexity of an idea or person appears to correlate with feelings of romantic love Time: The amount of time we spend thinking about something may trigger feelings of romantic love The belief that that thing can protect and comfort us: Feeling supported by something in a moment of personal vulnerability may trigger feelings of romantic love Prolonged eye contact: In addition to triggering feelings of romantic love, looking at eyes elicits all sorts of weird, unique psychological effects—for example, if you paint eyes on a collection box, people will donate more money, and if people see fake eyes painted on something, they act more morally in general; there is clearly a unique neurological pathway associated with processing the concept of eyes, so it would make sense that it could be involved with love Physical intimacy: Interaction while violating personal space, assuming the violation of personal space doesn’t put a person on guard, may trigger feelings of romantic love (this might be tied the vulnerability trigger) Sex: Maybe orgasms matter here, maybe they don’t, but sex and arousal seem to make other love systems form bonds faster—this trigger seems to affect women more than men and weaken with subsequent sex partners
Through understanding the above points, one can incite love in a target individual with an even higher fidelity than the method used by Arthur Aron. Specifically, the feeling of love can be reliably instigated in a subject by combining regular sex with a few sessions in which you:
Sit closely with the subject somewhere isolated with a view (even better if there is some taboo associated with the location which increases a feeling of vulnerability and protection) Hold hands Make prolonged, direct eye contact Discuss life philosophy
This technique takes about a week and a half to strongly set in and is generally effective as long as the target feels comfortable enough to be vulnerable and talk about things they otherwise wouldn’t feel safe discussing. An adequate level of comfort, aesthetic appeal, and hygiene is also necessary—a target is not going to tolerate prolonged close proximity and eye contact with someone who has horrid breath and stinking hair, and a target will not be able to engage in deep philosophical conversation if they are tired, hungry, cold, and feeling threatened or trapped.
The above technique boasts an admirable success rate on people with little sexual experience. Explaining the steps and the purpose of the “experiment” to a target (which we would recommend, in the name of good form) does not appear to lower the probability of this method working. This method is not from any specific set of research findings, but rather a conglomeration of a few studies combined with personal experimentation. It works reliably enough that we assume there must be something behind it.
This technique revolves around three core elements:
Maximizing feelings of vulnerability, backed up by feelings of safety Physiological modifiers like eye contact and sex Complex, cognitively engaging discussions that inspire self-reflection (read The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life if you don’t know how to have these)
Statistics on romantic love in arranged marriages strongly indicate that romantic love between people generally forms when they spend a lot of time around and rely on each other. We developed the process outlined above merely to see if romantic love could be developed more rapidly.
Our brains appear to use complexity—rather than actual closeness—as a proxy for the closeness of a relationship. Just as one might use weight as a proxy for volume to determine how much water is in a particular container (despite there being many other things could increase the weight of a container, such as rocks), our minds appear to use the apparent complexity of a person and the frequency with which we think about them as a proxy for our intimacy with that person.
It is an elegant system. Humans spend very little time thinking about or building models of people who are not romantic targets. We just don’t think about other people that much unless we are trying to get said people to mate with us.
If someone is successful in their romantic conquest, they will spend more and more time around their romantic target, further increasing the complexity of their mental image of the person, so the complexity of our image of a person could prove as a valid proxy for success in a romantic conquest. This would in turn increase the evolutionary advantage of falling in love with such a person.
In short: Since those about whom we think the most are commonly those we romantically pursue, the complexity of our mental models of others serves as a great proxy for our subconscious to measure when determining who/what to love. “”” -The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality
yeha, not seeing anything i disagree with in that quote touch and eye contact are big the “compelxity” is a missing ingredient i hadn’t ocncerned, but is clearly true
Glad to see some verification of the theory.
i do thing the hurdle most people fail to clear is going from “some guy/girl” to “potential romantic/sexual partner” and most attempts to bridge that gap are unsubtle and, from the perspective of the recepient, come out of nowehre like if one day your table jsut deciding to start humping your leg
Recent anecdote on that: I ran into one of the librarians I would see every other day at church. After that, we were both in each other’s “potential” box.
Ah, sounds like an opportunity to build on
Generally I think you’re correct that it starts as a one-way street. I’d like to address the giant Boomer in the room, which is the ideology most Americans have that courtship must be 100% organic and unforced by everyone.
mutual attraction at first sight is a real thing. it’s not usually the case though
Re: the giant Boomer again, this ideology is what sabotages the idea of marrying some nice old church lady’s niece. The problem is they don’t want to interfere in their female relatives’ romantic lives in any way, shape, or form. They consider it an imposition to even think about it. My parents are the same way, they would never dare to express an opinion on their children’s dating choices. They restrict themselves to occasional nagging about the married kids maybe having a kid someday. There’s a fanatical commitment to romance being unintentional.
yeah, it’s a moral commitment to never comment on anyone else’s romantic choices despite the fact that, as in all things, young people aren’t going to make good chocies and need some guidance
I run into this a lot on the internet too. If you suggest anything slightly different from “breeding will take care of itself” the reaction from the fast-life history crowd is intense.
and also, i don’t think boomers really have goals in romance and so don’t have anything to point towards contra me, where i try to make it pretty clear to those who will listen that the goal is really to marry a mentally stable women froma family without any big issues that’s the minimum baseline, because you have to be able to live with somone and marriage is ALWAYS about amrrying into a family, not jsut a person
100%
the higher baseline is a stable, intelligent, and attractive enough girl from a middle-class family without major issues
If only because the kids will regress to the girl’s family’s mean. And you want to love your kids.
and also, when you become a part of someone’s family, all their problems become your problems the schizophrenic aunt or the brother with multiples felonies all of a sudden become your problems. are they the sorts of problems you want to bring into your life? because marriage is ultimately the foundation for building a shared life, so what are you going to bring into your house that won’t leave? ^this is another thing, the old-timey view of marriage as foundatiion for shared life and growth isn’t really a thing anymore it’s jsut an expreession of love that doesn’t usually have a direction attached you approach dating a hell of a lot differently when you look at it with an eye towards building a stable life and producing healthy kids than when you treat it as the quest for good feelings
This is actually a subproblem of what we’re talking about, which describes one of the problems with forming friendships in the NWO in general, which is that it generally entails a lower standard of living than we’re accustomed to because more people have more problems now than they used to.
yeah, tons of problems, and a lot of giving up dealing with them “i want someone who will acccept my trauma” versus “i want someone with whom i can overcome challenges together”
You’re talking about the even worse problem of victim signaling. Maybe I need to make a broader point about the bad=bad thing. I can’t imagine how I would do it though. It would have to be a 1984-tier novella. Never imagined being tasked with the propaganda challenge of convincing people that bad is bad and good is good. Especially when they have elaborate sciencey explanations for why bad is actually good. It really does feel like arguing with a tidal wave sometimes.
if bad thing so bad why feel so good?
I think I’ll post this conversation as a starting point for discussion.
people will intellectually accept that, say, cake will make them fat. i’m not entirely convinced they actually beleive it, deep down
My dad always jokes that being happy is healthy, and donuts make you happy. He also has the worst diet of anyone I know, so you know it’s not 100% a joke.
it’s in the same vein of wine and coffee being technically fruit juice, making them healthy this is a christian blog, we will gladly talk abotu masturbation but will make no mention of sex
I did a local weightlifting competition where I won my section by default because the other three guys got disqualified. One of them didn’t submit his paperwork on time and he was at the front desk scrambling to get it done at the last second like a degenerate while the girl there was trying to explain that it had to have been submitted three weeks ago. Another one missed his weigh-in by 20 pounds, again suggesting a lack of executive function. The other one actually competed but couldn’t get his squats to parallel, so none of them counted and he bonked out. Should have practiced the way he needed to perform! So I was very excited to win, obviously this is all evidence of my genetic superiority in general.
Nah, none of that happened. I just wrote it for illustration and to get a rise out of you. If you believed it, you’re bad at judging character (and you should know that about yourself).
The reason we’re disgusted by that anecdote is it represents a feminine competitive style in a masculine competitive arena. A truly competitive man wants to beat other men who are playing their best, because there’s no greater thrill in life than a victory in a very close game. Think of Kobe shooting a buzzer-beater in the championship game or Brady driving down the field in the last-minute to win a Superbowl–do you think those guys look back more fondly on those moments or the times they absolutely dominated and crushed a much weaker team? In general, strong men want the people around them to be as strong as possible, even if it means losing sometimes, and are disappointed and saddened otherwise. It’s already lonely at the top, but it sickens the soul to be at the level of a Tom Brady when you’re playing against a bunch of screwups and middle schoolers.
I bring this up because I was reading the White Papers article surveying statistics about the plight of young men and realized half the men reading it would be ecstatic to see all these young men failing. (Would they go so far as posting popcorn gifs? I think they would.) They take it as proof of their own genetic superiority, and see the failures as weakness being culled from the population. I’ll leave aside the truth or falsehood of that model for now, because it’s more important to address the value system that advises cheering for high suicide rates. There’s an underlying assumption that bad things create hard people which creates good things and good things create soft people which creates bad things, therefore good things are bad and bad things are good and we should cheer when bad things are happening. Again, let’s have the debate about that model after deciding what the measure of its success is.
I assume we have agreed, by instinct, that the anecdote in the first paragraph described a person with the wrong values. A healthy man with the value system of a healthy man would not be happy in that situation, he would be disappointed. He wants to engage in a competition with his peers where everything is held as equal as possible except for the variable being tested, which in the case of a weightlifting competition is the ability to perform heavy lifts. It may even be true that a separate variable, executive function, is caused with yet another value, genetic quality, which would have caused him to be the better lifter in the competition (then again, it might not). Doesn’t matter, he’s still disappointed because he didn’t have the opportunity to prove it. There was no necessity to strive, all he had to do was show up and put forth a nominal effort. There’s no pride to be had in correlations. Taking pride in signifiers and implications of victory rather than the thing itself is for women.
There is also a general moral principle that ought to at least call into question the notion that bad is good and good is bad because bad things make good things and good things make bad things (which is begging the question).
Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!
Isaiah 5:20
And specifically regarding accelerationism,
Why not say—as some slanderously claim that we say—“Let us do evil that good may result”? Their condemnation is just!
Romans 3:8
Even if you aren’t a Christian, consider how expensive it would have been to write these things down even one time back before the printing press, and then consider how many tens of thousands of times these lines were copied down by scribes and monks. There must have been some reason they thought it was important. This suggests a coherence between the Christian principle and the instincts we can observe in reaction to the weightlifting story.
I understand I haven’t made an actual argument here. This is an appeal to moral values that are prior to reason and already exist inside your breast, whether because of natural selection or because you were made in the image of God and carry a copy of his law inside you. I could make a scientific case and talk about hormesis and the stress-recovery-adaptation cycle all day–people who know me IRL know this–but it would have to come after we agree on the value system. There’s no sense getting caught up in discussions about distance before we even know which direction we want to go. And I’ve been very politely ignoring the fact that the hyenas who cheer for suicide and bullying and abortion and all manner of evils can’t be convinced otherwise by reason because they are religiously living out a perverted value system motivated by a selfish joy in seeing their neighbors commit slow suicide so they can have their neighbors’ stuff later.
There’s a step that comes before admitting you have a problem, which is the desire to not have problems (to admit that bad=bad). You have to want good things before you admit you have bad things, and without those prerequisites there’s no policy prescription, genetic quality, or meteor from heaven that can solve your problems. We will go extinct if this competitive style is allowed to persist among men, no matter what else is fixed. It’s a single point of failure. You have to want your problems to be solved. I understand you want to be a detached irony bro, LOLing and LMAOing as your enemies collapse under the weight of their own contradictions. Unsurprisingly, the Bible has a lot to say about that too. Yes, I’m aware it’s sometimes a matter of laughing or crying, but laughter is the wrong response to a suicide. It’s the signifier of a morally broken man.
Aeoli Pera 