Obligatory video (click at your own risk)

I’ve been in multiple relationships by now but I pretty much never dated or only very sparsely through my 20s, depending on what you’d count. A few reasons:

• When I was younger online dating was much worse than today and had even fewer women, and I feel like approaching women in real life was much harder for several reasons, especially for me given my social anxiety, nerdiness, and lack of opportunity to cross paths with women in my life.
• Financial difficulties - I was living with my parents as an adult and was focused on fixing that situation, and was embarrassed/pessimistic about dating.
• I don’t really fit in easily with the vast majority of people in terms of race, religion, activities, or attitudes about several things like money. It feels like race and religion have become less of an issue today, but I still struggle to find women I can relate to in terms of attitudes.
• Overall questionable appearance - OK physique but with bad hair and clothes.

Sidenote: One thing that annoys me is the attitude of measuring people, both men and women, by their level of relationship success. There’s very little that’s fair or rational about attraction, in fact it’s the best example area where rationality would be almost entirely futile. So don’t feel bad about it, just do what you want for yourself and ignore judgmental people.

Well if you’re lucid, can’t you just like fly out of there or something?

Yeah let’s just allow roving gangs of brownshirts to run around attacking and terrorizing minorities

Well that’s blatantly not the argument at all. The question isn’t whether to react, but what do you do about it?

The vast majority of fascist movements are destroyed through nonviolence rather than violence, which itself is typically inseparable from fascism. To refer to the post below, what ended Jim Crow? Was it a bunch of black people going around punching suspected Klan members? On the contrary it was the reverse. The Klan “lynching people and getting away with it” included key rallying points like the murders of Emmett Till, or the Mississippi Burning murders, along with state violence like the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Sure, maybe the fascists themselves got away with it, but fascism didn’t. The things the Klan and other segregationists fought for were dismantled, in large part thanks to their own violent efforts.

Nazis don’t need a justification for their violence, but their enablers - Von Papen, or the would-be modern equivalent Mike Pence - do. And these enablers need to tell themselves, their family, and their neighbors, that they have good reasons for their decisions. Exposing fascism as the senseless violence it is robs them of that justification, while giving the fascists a threat to refer to provides it.

I’m just gonna focus entirely on the common misunderstanding of the use of violence against Nazis in WWII because that’s such a common argument for punching nazis and it’s really quite wrong on so many levels.

“But Nazis were stopped by violence in WWII.” That’s a meaningless statement without the missing last word. Violence stopped Nazis militarily, after they had already seized power in Germany and were invading other countries. Today we’re not in a military battle with Nazis, we’re in an ideological battle.

So why did the Nazis seize power in Germany? Because they weren’t punched enough? Well the exact mechanism behind how the nazis seized power is a complex web of illegal political maneuvers, political violence, and yes, some degree of ideological success by the nazis. But a key part of that ideological success was the fear of political violence by their opponents - most notably the Reichstag fire - to justify the power that they were illegally taking. It was basically “desperate times require desperate measures”. So in the ideological battle, the perceived* use of violence by Nazi opponents was actually a key part of their victory within Germany.

Meanwhile, over in the US, the contrast between the violence employed by the German American Bund (the US version of the Nazi party) and largely Jewish peaceful protesters ended up being a massive embarrassment to the Bund from which they never recovered. Again, ideologically, non-violence proved quite effective.

Point being, and this should be obvious - violence is a really bad option for succeeding in an ideological battle. Yes, in a military battle, it’s the only rational option. But in an ideological battle, it’s actually counterproductive.

*Obligatory caveat that whether the Reichstag fire was actually set by nazi opponents remains debated, but suffice to say the political atmosphere at the time made it plausible.

TNT used to be a non-stop Shawshank Redemption loop.

Every keyboard must have a home and end key that doesn’t require pressing additional keys like fn, and home must go to the start of the line, while end goes to the end of the line.

Tea Soup

We’ve had six straight administrations of almost total non-enforcement of antitrust. I’m happy with Biden bringing lots civil cases when no one else has done anything about the problem, especially because civil cases are much easier to win. The goal should be to fix the problem more than punish people for what past administrations effectively legalized.

I tried to create a blog on substack once, I got literally zero views across a few posts. I feel like the only blogs there that get recommended are by people who are already semi-famous, suggesting the usual problem of recommendation algorithms killing entry for new creators. It also strongly encourages a paid model, you also usually have to subscribe to comment on others’ posts which makes it hard to get your blog out there. I’d say it’s more a publishing platform for people who are already well known than for ordinary people.

Great now some fancy restaurant is gonna start offering a basket of fries cooked in lavender oil for $200.

My go-to is to grab a used samsung galaxy from Ebay. Usually the best bang for the buck. The reasonably new ones have no headphone jack, but the solid dongles (not the flexible ones) work pretty well for that.

Have no social life, it’s much cheaper.

But in all seriousness, if you have to have a social life, limit your spending on that stuff. Restaurant and bar tabs can add up quickly. Budget, limit your drinking, and if you don’t wanna limit your drinking, at least do some cheap drinking at home first.

“I’m really great at reading people/spotting BS/etc.” It seems like almost invariably this is said by people who are quick to make assumptions about people and as a result, are terrible at figuring out what someone is actually thinking.

Of course the point of likening it to a virus is to compare it the involuntary nature of a viral infection, even though must people have a voluntary role to play in accepting ideas. So if you take something into your body with full consent, knowing it will reproduce itself, I guess that’s more mind sex? That sounds a lot less harmful.

I bet this started as a troll and then everyone lost the plot

The drawing guy is merely tilted at the hips, Trump looks like two 10 year old kids where one is sitting on the other’s shoulders, with his legs out in front.

Actually that would explain a lot.

Well it’s not actually available yet (and perhaps won’t ever be), so it’s more cantibalism.

There were 2 things:

1. Over time it became obvious the site was promoting mass market fluff over the unique content that made reddit what it used to be. In particular having r/all as a default sub and no option to remove it seemed particularly egregious. Seemed like an attempt to impose a monoculture on the user base, and I didn’t like that culture which was mostly images of tweets which is a trend I especially hate.
2. The API pricing and going public was the last straw. I looked at reddit as a wikipedia-like place where information was shared freely, for whomever and even whatever wanted to see it. I even bought gold in my younger and more naive years. But if the officers were so keen on making profits for themselves on my shitposting, why am I not getting paid? Injecting greed ruined the whole thing.

Look into switching jobs. Unemployment is on the low end. People who switch jobs tend to make more money, and it’s easier to get a high-paying job when you have a job already because employers can’t help but think more highly of you if someone else is wiling to employ you.

Depending on what you do a recruiter or staffing agency may help. What’s worked best for me is posting an updated linkedin profile with keywords that recuriters will look for that relate to buzzwords for your job. Remember recruiters are typically trained as salespeople and may not know much about your actual job, they just look for words. Put in that you’re looking for work (but only show it to recruiters) and see if anyone bites.