nerdspeak

I am not panicking yet. Of course, the Democrats want us to panic, to cover up how gutless their response has been so far. The executive branch has been overactive since the 1960s, as the legislative branch has been unwilling to take the political heat required to actually do anything. The president has filled in the vacuum. Although it's illegal for the president to shut down or gut agencies established by Congress, presidents always do illegal things. I am not panicking yet, although I agree it's very bad. We should worry about what happens if federal courts issue a decision Trump doesn't like and Trump decides to do it anyway, in broad daylight. This would be pretty unprecedented. Even presidents that subscribed to the unitary exec theory, like Nixon and Bush II, generally followed court orders, even if they dragged their feet. If Trump goes against the courts, then the question is, what do those elements of the executive branch that take an oath to the constitution, rather than the president, do? By "those elements," I mean the military. However, even a military junta would likely quickly revert to civilian control in a place like the U.S. I wouldn't worry too much about future elections not happening or whatever. Elections are run by the states, not the federal government. Trump lacks the popularity to overhaul the government the way he is attempting to do, so he will fail and most things will go back to how they were, except slightly worse.

Lack of economic opportunity is a real problem. But you should probably say, men can’t get sex with the women they feel entitled to. They need to lower their standards. E.g., if a man has a minimum wage job, only high school education, and lives with five roommates, then he shouldn’t expect to date women with professional jobs who can afford to live alone — even if she comes from the same social class originally. A guy like that, experiencing downward social mobility, needs to date someone in a similar situation, which may mean dating “down” either in looks or in social background. When I lived in London I found it mildly hard to date women who were as pretty as what I was used to, because I was competing with the most successful men in the world for a set of women who generally don’t value their appearance. I valued companionship so I settled for a temporary relationship with someone not that attractive. Instead of being bitter I just accepted the conditions and lowered my standards. When I lived in Kyiv, it was extremely easy to date. Not just pretty girls from the village, but very pretty professors, doctors, lawyers and IT executives, who had multiple graduate degrees and had travelled abroad a lot and spoke perfect English. Mind you before the war. On Khreshatyk, the main high street, I would often see gorgeous women walking away from average-looking men, crying after being broken up with. I’ve never seen anything like it. I guess that sounds awesome from a male perspective but it actually creates a lot of other problems. Namely, women are typically scared to communicate their needs for fear of being abruptly dumped, and this is coupled with (often) extreme paranoia and drama related to fear of being cheated on.

Depends what you mean by left. For Mao, all power comes from violence or the threat of violence. For Lenin, the role of the state is to enforce class exploitation. The actual left is pretty cynical. I agree that liberals have a deluded idealistic view of reality.

I agree, there’s an element of the red/orange Owen Cooke bitter former drug dealer / incel worldview in a some of what Leo says about political stuff and dating. Not saying it’s wrong, but the framing is a bit negative and odd sometimes.

My definition of a state means you have monopoly on legal organized violence within your territory. The Bruderhofs try to deal with problems internally and avoid calling police, but if the police raid them, they cannot fight the cops off even if they wanted to.

You need high entry costs to deter criminal elements. To join the Bruderhofs, you have to donate everything you own to the community. To become a Hasidic Jew, you have to adopt a whole set of fringe beliefs and an extreme regime of holidays, daily prayer, etc.

I know some elites, and I don’t think they are consciously slitting throats or whatever (although they are on some level). For them it’s just professional decision-making and if people are vulnerable to the outcomes, that’s their responsibility. Most elites are smart, but not particularly deep thinkers.

Yeah so you say, “I don’t think we’re compatible long term.” And leave the door open for both to date other people. You don’t directly say you’re looking for someone else or have another gf, that’s just rude.

@Twentyfirst is basically right, not every woman is looking for a long-term serious relationship. Many are scared of commitment and getting hurt, so prefer something casual, or think the whole idea of long-term monogamy is politically problematic haha.

@Leo Gura I know what you mean, but there are also anarchists who don’t want to abolish the state but want to mostly ignore it and live under the radar, cooperating with a small community of people they trust. Basically a return to pre-industrial craft and agricultural society, when the state was still very weak. Of course they can’t resist the police or whatever, but they mostly just opt out — don’t use bank credit, create small community schools, object to military service, and try to stay off the grid. The Bruderhofs are one extreme example but there are non-religious people who try living like this too. I don’t think this will change or improve society overall, stop imperialist wars, or end capitalism, but I can see how it’s an attractive way to live for a certain kind of personality.

If you’re under 25, sure maybe. This doesn’t work in adult relationships where you actually rely on each other for maintaining a household, raising children, caring for elderly family members. You need a stable partner you can trust, and the only way you get that is if you’re stable too. That doesn’t mean put up with nonsense, but you have to be willing to articulate problems and try to work them out over time — like, at least 3-6 months — before abruptly leaving. Otherwise the woman will be able to tell you’re flaky and disinvest.

@Actualising I don’t know what your personality is like. However, in dating (in the West) it’s assumed that you’re together because you’re the best available option for each other. If you find someone better and leave, she can’t get mad at you for that, unless you were cheating. You can soften the blow by telling her in advance of the breakup that you doubt it will work out long term for xyz reason, and then she gets to create some distance while still getting the support from the relationship. Unfortunately, for my personality, I need to go a bit further and find it’s better to start replacing people before I move on from them. Otherwise, when I break things off with someone who is not a good long-term partner, in the following weeks I freak out and end up taking them back.

PUA and gold-digging subcultures both take reasonable impulses and then push them to unhealthy extremes. It's gotten worse since 2008. Pre-2008 RSD, for example, was mostly just rehashed Tony Robbins positivity stuff. The dark marketing stuff became useful post-2008 when you suddenly had a lot of unemployed young men with little to do. Later, people like Roosh V pushed it to even darker directions.

@Princess Arabia I don’t really agree, going out to meet partners for casual sex I has been a normal part of Western culture since the 1960s, the pua guys are especially thirsty and weird about it but the behavior they’re trying to optimize is basically normal. Gold digging is not. Thank you for sharing the video, quite interesting.

I don't think he needs to care about them as people as he doesn't know them, and many men have a physical type and/or style they're attracted to, and that's okay and not necessarily objectification or anything like that. But I do think the whole "target" vocabulary and mindset reeks of thirst. You just have a hypothesis that you might like to talk to this person based on how they look and move -- that's all you've got to go on before you talk to this person. They're not a "target" lmao.

@UpperMaster It just as often back-fires. The woman you're interested will assume you're interested in her friend and write you off The friend might like you and block the switch to the friend It can seem like you were struggling with the friend so you switched to the woman you're interested in, which looks desperat This is especially the case if the friend is less conventionally attractive than the girl you're interested in.

"Really existing socialism" is a Brezhnev-era term that refers to the Eastern bloc in the 60s and 70s. I would expand it to include socialism in Vietnam, Cuba, Laos, China, some African states in the 60s.

Hard for me to swallow the claim that neoliberal shock therapy is more “modern” than really-existing socialism (despite its flaws). But it’s your thread so I don’t want to hijack it.

@Bobby_2021 instead of breaking up they should have done things more like Deng in China. But with the spike in oil prices the Soviet leaders got greedy, and Gorbachev was very naive. China also learned a lot from the USSR breakup. Hindsight is 20:20.

USSR had serious flaws, but if you account for where Russia was in 1917, and all of the war and craziness, by the 1970s they accomplished a lot. Most Soviet citizens had guaranteed access to basic food, shelter, medical care, and education, which we still haven’t achieved in the USA.

Not especially, but as Leo says, motivation and attraction to novelty rapidly decreases. In my twenties I’d feel impulses to learn or research new things just for the hell of it, even if not related to my work at all. Now, I only learn new stuff directly related to my research or other work projects. Part of that is context and life demands, but some of it is biological for sure.

@Fluran Alex Karp is not a socialist. 3rd generation Frankfurt School is not socialist, it’s to the right of the current SPD in Germany. It’s interesting that a Frankfurt School person ends up head of a US national security state project, given the many ties between the earlier Frankfurt School and the CIA, which promoted Marcuse and Adorno as controlled opposition. Adorno published in CIA-funded journals and Marcuse even had a handler.

I didn’t call the countries social democracies, just that the Swedish Social Democratic Party was in power for a long time. It’s also not really proper to lump them all together, there are a lot of differences.

Swedish model is increasingly more like neoliberal statism. Becuase the social democrats were in power for so long, people expect the state to do stuff for them, but for the past 15 years the elites have drunk the New Public Management kool-aid hard. So, while keeping state provision, they privatized the delivery of the public services either using the market or market-like scoring indicators, and it's created crazy shortages (as well as a lot of rent-seeking). One of the reasons you have so many problems integrating migrants in Sweden is that the waiting lists for schools are several years, so a refugee who comes at 14 from Syria might not start attending school till 17. Of course it's a much better place to live than the US or UK, but the idea that Social Darwinist market survival-of-the-fittest should be our political horizon is pretty silly (although understandable if you live there). Imo, given where they started, the Chinese model is a lot more impressive.

@Ninja_pig They charge high tuition because that's what it costs to provide a US-style university education, and the public funding base has been cut drastically. Even at the most expensive schools, the private liberal arts colleges like Amherst or Williams, the $85k tuition (bear in mind, avg tuition paid is $15k because of financial aid) doesn't fully cover the college's cost per student. They make up the shortfall through income from their endowment investments. There is administrative bloat (with Vice deans of xyz), but the main issue is it's expensive to educate people, which is why there needs to be public funding. Most students don't end up at rich private schools like Williams. We could make it cheaper by reducing quality. E.g., I'm in Belgium right now, and the university's cost per student is more like $10k (each student pays close to $0). Why so cheap? Average class size is ~500 at undergraduate level and over 100 even at master's-level No office hours for direct interaction with professors -- this starts only at PhD level Libraries are open 9 am - 5 pm on weekdays only Athletics faciltiies and university-sponsored student life basically doesn't exist This is in Belgium, one of the wealthiest and most advanced countries in the world. So, if there weren't student loans, public universities in the US would be more like this (lower quality). It didn't use to be this bad in Belgium but the system is different -- university budgets are directly provided by the regional government -- and, guess what? Center-right and far-right parties have been working hard to defund the universities for the past 30 years. As societies get richer, it makes sense to spend more on education. It's better if the rich pay for it directly rather than through bizarre back-door student loan schemes like we have in the US, but it's a creative adaptation andit could be worse.