nerdspeak

I’m a lefty. If by “deep state” you mean career prosecutors and law enforcement agents who have their own esprit de corps and agenda, which is often anti-democratic, you can’t seriously dispute that this exists. It got much stronger after 9/11. If we could proceed in a more scientific way, instead of making broad generalizations or constructing straw men to demonize, the discussion will be a lot more productive.

"Trump claims Presidential immunity from criminal prosecution — the Lockean executive prerogative to break the law in order to preserve it. There is already legislative (parliamentary) and judicial immunity, to prevent abusive exercise of the law by the executive — which in Locke’s moment was that of the hereditary monarchy and its appointed Majesty’s deputies (including judges). What is usually overlooked is the need to prevent the reverse, the legislative (and judicial) abuse of the executive function of government." Worth reading in full. While the far-left has diverse views about Trump, some figures are on board with Trump's unitary executive theory. https://platypus1917.org/2024/05/01/why-not-trump-again-2/

You let them keep doing their thing. If people want to believe the earth is 6,000 years old that's fine as long as they don't try to impose their beliefs on everyone else. Of course they will try, but it won't work long-term.

You can’t help people get out of it quickly, it takes years. Like it’s really not worth it, they have to already suspect there’s something wrong with it from the beginning, get burned by it, and then have a friend or therapist who can help process the emotions in a way that helps them move out of it, rather than reinforcing the belief that it’s necessary. I’ll talk about my experience in Kyiv. It’s not a traditional society by any means but gender roles are more traditional and women are encouraged to be very strategic about their dating to improve their material security. I started to see that it wasn’t good for me and then started gathering evidence that it wasn’t necessary. Yes, more women in those cultures are superficially nice to Western men because they perceive us as high-status and potentially helpful in a crisis. But if the woman knows I’m playing an arbitrage game, and I know I’m playing an arbitrage game, there’s always a transactional element. And transactional people are not deeply loyal — if someone gives them a better offer they’ll jump ship. They will also keep escalating their demands to see what they can extract. This always feels kind of shitty, and the only way to win this game is to stop playing it. As a side note, even quite dumb Western expats in Ukraine are aware of this transactional bent and complain, often blaming it on Ukraine being unusually unstable, or Western influence, and say that women from Russia or Belarus are much cooler haha. After the war started, the demands from my Ukrainian partner escalated beyond what I could offer without feeling resentment and I just felt a strong desire to get out of these transactional relationships and be around people I could learn things from.

@Danioover9000 There is no going back to traditional society. Women are not going to suddenly decide to go back to staying at home as unpaid domestic servants raising 4-5 children. Moreover, the high (male) wages required to support that model no longer exist. @mrPixel The US "left" talks itself in circles around cultural issues because it cannot directly challenge finance capital while it's still tied to the Democratic Party. That said, the Biden administration has made some strides through investment in domestic manufacturing, This is not a permanent solution but it's a band-aid for 10-15 years.

I would sort of agree with this. Five years ago I was on-board with the neo-traditionalist ortho-bro stuff but if you actually go and live in these supposedly awesome based red-pilled countries you see that the patriarchal structure really limits people's freedoms a lot. I started to ask myself, do I really want a relationship to be more durable with a woman just because there is a huge power imbalance pressuring her to stay with me? For me, the answer is no -- I'd rather live in a society where she is free to go find someone else if she wants. I am not so scared of being alone or going back into the dating pool that I want my partner to feel trapped with me. The problem with the West is not the decline of traditional based patriarchal values. The problem is free market fundamentalism gone completely rampant, due to legalized corruption. When people lose all semblance of material security they start to go crazy.

This would mean no more federal student loans. All of higher ed would collapse. The harsh market-based system in the US is only legitimate (to the extent it is) because it provides cheap loans on very lenient terms to people to get educated. So, yeah, we have extreme inequality, but at least make gestures at equality of opportunity. More broadly, I skimmed the program and I don't think it's feasible. It's political technology designed to mobilize his base. To implement radical overhauls like this requires some degree of latent support, or extreme terror. In terms of support -- okay, maybe it's there in some regions. But California and the northeastern cities -- where all the money is -- not to mention large portions of the security services, would just not accept it. In terms of extreme state terror -- I don't see it happening. Going back to mass support, you could say, only 30% of Germans supported the Nazis in the early 30s. But Germany had only been a democracy for 15 years, you had huge numbers of people with PTSD and combat experience from WWI -- the context was completely different. What's more likely than implementation of this program is that continued erosion of US republican institutions and civil rights -- which eroded under Obama and Biden too, just not as fast -- will accelerate. The outcome will be more like Poland under Law and Justice, Hungary under Orban, or Serbia under Vucic. And in fact, the US is not so different from those places already in terms of domestic politics, with opinion tightly controlled through corporate control of the media and tech platforms.

It’s not possible to govern a capitalist economy without the alphabet agencies. I don’t think there is a serious intention to do this, it would be bad for the capitalists too.

Were they horny, greedy, and caught up in their egos? Yes of course. But society was going in this direction anyway. Look at hip-hop culture and reality TV from the early 2000s. Pickup was a surface symptom of broader cultural and economic changes in rich countries that started in the 80s.

Extroverts can learn some techniques and become good in a few months. Introverts take a lot longer and usually drop out before getting good, because it takes so much energy and they’re fighting their nature. Owen is really complicated and neurodivergent so I wouldn’t base your dating strategy off of modeling him. I wouldn’t follow any of his strategic advice either, although his tactical advice is okay.

About five years. Anyone can build their skills to be worth $100-$150 per hour. I could have done it in two years but was a bit timid. By welfare states, I mean places like the Netherlands, Canada, and Germany, with free healthcare, generous unemployment insurance, free job retraining and education.

I solved this by just doing work that’s fun for me. As basically a freelancer so I don’t have a boss pushing me around, and I control my hours. What I do now is not as fun as being a graduate student / lecturer (the job I left to try to get rich), but it’s still fun enough to do 10-20 hours per week. A savings buffer of 6-12 months is good in case you get sick or need to pivot. I also have invested enough in a retirement account so that by the time I’m 70 I’ll have $800k or so if the economy keeps growing. I’ll keep contributing, but there’s also social security, medicaid, etc. Obsessing beyond that just isn’t worth it. You could be dead in a couple years, or the government could seize your assets, or this whole thing could just be a dream. Another approach if you’re too neurotic for what I just described, is to immigrate permanently to a welfare state. This takes planning but is surprisingly easy.

You can’t pay for advice this good.

The problem with this approach is you’ll probably fail to get free quickly. Making lots of money is really hard even if you have initial success. And after grinding after money for years, you’re not the same person afterwards. In my first shot, I dropped out of a low-paid passion job to sell out, and become a millionaire in 3 years of grinding. But then I lost it all, and took years to recover. Now I figured out how to work 10 hours per week in a lucrative thing and spend my remaining 40 good hours on passion projects, but I would have been better off just sticking to the low-paid passion job in the first place. Putting off doing what you like to make money first is like saving sex for your old age. Some people just like making money for it’s own sake and that works for them, but if you’ve got something you like that fulfills a need, you’re better off sticking to that even if it only makes a lower-middle-class income. I would go back to my lower-middle-class passion job if I could but I’m no longer competitive in that career track, so I have to settle for being an amateur crank.

Bribery is necessary to simply survive in Ukraine. To get any public service, including healthcare and university exam results, requires bribes. You could argue it’s just cultural difference though, as it’s done in a very systematic and organized way.

I took yopo in a shamanic context. Basically a combination of the two. Screamed for an hour straight. Definitely felt a lot more relaxed after. Would recommend.

Unless you have tons of time on your hands or are unusually gregarious, pickup is not a great way to meet women...it's basically a marketing scam, and I say that as someone who has gotten pretty "good" results with pickup, to the point where I got paid to teach it. It feels good to get success through it for the first year or two because it's hard and dynamic. But I switched entirely to online and social circle when I am single, and that is true of most of my former instructor-level friends as well. It is just not a good use of time relative to other ways. Caveat -- I still chat to women giving me the eye already, but that is not "pickup" the way the industry used to teach it.

Her gender argument is not about denying any biological basis to gender, that is the straw man version. The argument is that its expression is performative, as in, you learn to perform your gender role in a given cultural context by imitating others and through positive/negative reinforcement. So, male gender expression in 14th century Mongolia is obviously going to be pretty different from in Manhattan or Hollywood in 2024. And, as people see other gender performances over time, roles will evolve. So, a straight-laced guy with a crew-cut in the 1960s starts to see hippies with long hair getting more attention and sex, so he starts to grow out his hair etc. It's not really that controversial an argument, in fact it's pretty obvious.

I studied with several of her former PhD students and drank the kool-aid hard for a while. But, it’s mostly junk. Her book on Hegel isn’t bad.

Netenyahu is prolonging the war for domestic political reasons, and is completely indifferent to civilian casualties. That said, what’s happening is war, not genocide. Calling it genocide is to inflate the term beyond any real meaning.

Truck driver, heavy equipment operator have pretty short courses. I think Indeed is best search engine for blue-collar but I'm not sure. Welding and HVAC take longer but pay more.

Unless you have a specialized skill, the easiest way to make a lot of money is to do things people don't want to do. You can make low six figures in a lot of blue-collar jobs that only require a 1-2 month vocational course. If you prefer white-collar, a lot of really boring state and city government jobs pay quite well after you get past the first few years.

I think you should probably start meditating and maybe make some friends

Most pickup "advice" is designed to make men feel insecure so they'll pay for coaching and information products, and stay in the product cycle once they do. This is true of most self-help niches tbh, including professional psychotherapy.

I have experimented with poly and didn't find it worked too well for me. The relationships I had were kind of thin, and all came crashing down during a major crisis (Russian invasion lol) when multiple partners wanted support from me at the same time. I couldn't be there for all of them equally. You might say, that's a unique event, but I know a lot of boomer New Left types among whom poly was very popular in the 70s, including a psychotherapist (not mine) who is pretty self-aware. They all concluded that it doesn't work very well. That doesn't mean that it is ethically problematic, just that it isn't very satisfying long term. A big part of the needs romantic relationships fill in contemporary Western society are basic survival needs that would have historically been met by the extended family or tribe. By that I don't mean housing or food, but the sense that someone would be there for you in an emergency, if you got sick, etc. Polyamorous relationships seem like they might meet that need even better -- I am romantically bonded with multiple people, so if one doesn't come through I have a back-up! But it doesn't really work that way. Summary of their points. The female orgasm releases a lot of oxytocin, so if a woman is orgasming with multiple partners, she will feel conflicted about which partners' needs to prioritize. This can cause a lot of problems and jealousy even without any sort of acute crises, especially because, in general, women into poly will have an easier time finding partners than men. Both because women are more selective, and because fewer women are open to poly. Men don't release much oxytocin from physical intimacy -- it's more through emotional and verbal intimacy. However, men don't really have much of an incentive to pursue verbal intimacy in poly relationships. This intimacy is built largely through verbal and emotional conflcit, and instead of working through these issues with their partners and building intimacy, if the option to go see another woman is there, most men will just withdraw and start spending time with another woman...until conflict starts with that woman too. So, the relationships end up being kind of superficial for the men, because they have no incentive to stick it through. The ones that stuck with alternative lifestyles said the swingers' lifestyle is actually a lot better for relationships than poly, because both partners are getting the dopamine and excitement together.