I'm reasonably happy with an ordinary job and an ordinary but lovely wife and three kids I have hopes for. They are absolutely not interested in any of that.
Heartless humanist, unmovable automaton, distributed midwit, fount of terrifying knowledge and purveyor of Collegey Velveteen Discourse. Insightful and painful enough to be the germ of something really excellent. @tznkai on Twitter and elsewhere
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I'm reasonably happy with an ordinary job and an ordinary but lovely wife and three kids I have hopes for. They are absolutely not interested in any of that.
It turns out you can either consciously think about why people act in certain ways and thus inject themes. Or you can unconsciously do it, still injecting themes. Sucks tbh
Also what a hilarious woke cartoon from the 80s: a multi-racial family with superpowers, they fight crime!
For year's I've had this fragment of "cartoon about superpowered family" driving me nuts about a cartoon I used to watch and I'm pretty sure it was Bionic Six, thanks TV Tropes!
(there's definitely also an element of doing this sort of thing to prove dominance over other men, and expecting that women will throw themselves at you as your just reward)
theory like gravity is a theory at this point
I've personally found it pretty hard to hold onto unrequited love long past being a teenager so I'm skeptical, but that may just be me
Some free life advice I give people professionally and personally: we're constantly performing for each other and some of that is inevitable. But whoever you first present yourself to be is who you get locked into, so try to make it as much a match to your authentic self as possible.
Like I wouldn't change myself even for a woman I was desperately in love with because that's a recipe for mutual misery but if I was going to I'd start by doing a little recon.
Do we think Michael ever considered asking the girl he's in love with what she's looking for in a guy
When I was in high school I told my English teacher that if I ever became a writer I would write stories without any deeper meaning just to have a good story and she was like "that's not how it'll turn out". It turns out she was right even about my D&D oneshots.
Blocked this person trying to summon "actual leftists" because goodness that seems like a waste of everyone's time
Might be related to KB5063878. Not entirely sure how to fix it.
So all of my files reappeared, sort of. I think I somehow lost access to my bootdrive and fell back to another NVME I had forgotten I had plugged in. Which explains why everything disappeared all of a sudden.
I mean this sincerely, they hired too good of an actor
It's not just attractiveness although that's part of it, some of it is just raw force of personality
People thought Thanos had a point when he manifestly did not!
RETVN
I choose to blame our turn away from saturday morning cartoons and towards subtle, flawed characters and an unwillingness to clearly indicate everyone's problematic fave is in fact problematic no matter what your fanfic imputes.
We do seem to have a lot of people who think of themselves as savvy are really just screaming that they can be fooled by a charismatic person saying nonsense and/or hateful demagoguery.
I actually did that with my kids once and it worked okay
Gee I wonder why there was a prohibition on encouraging prayer
![Sec. 25.901. EXERCISE OF CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT TO PRAY. A public school student has an absolute right to individually, voluntarily, and silently pray or meditate in school in a manner that does not disrupt the instructional or other activities of the school. A person may not require[, encourage,] or coerce a student to engage in or refrain from such prayer or meditation during any school activity.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:qcpnd5dlcugj64oqpeepvzwc/bafkreidhk2dhtuw6bdqumuiybsj2q5yq2xxy2majido4celsadmaepxtfu@jpeg "Click to view full size")
There's some potential protections / productive mischief to be caused given the here but it would definitely mark you as a Problem. I don't think that's the purpose but uh, this could not be better designed to make religious minorities / objectors feel isolated and shamed.
It's also weirdly structured, where an employee can revoke their own consent to participate instead of you know just not participating.
What. The law appears to require a liability waiver to participate. How incredibly craven.
Speaking from the alternate universe where we still have any sort of religion clause jurisprudence, setting aside time for a moment of silence / religious text reading is probably constitutional, this is doing it's very best to make it unconstitutional
Oh Jesus chat rooms. Remember chat rooms?
Pre-Elon but Twitter was probably the worst thanks to Algorithm being finely tuned to maximize conflict, sorry, engagement. Reddit is difficult to generalize because it's a million fiefdoms about half of which are porn but I would not call it generally an oasis of conflict.
what's interesting is that schmitt/hochman/whoever wrote this is aware enough of how foreign this is to the actual american experience that they have to include "continental europeans" into this category of legitimate americans
I think this is normal tbh
Hell hath no fury like a crotchety forum regular upset that a new poster either started a new thread instead of digging up an 8-year-old thread on a similar topic or revived an 8-year-old thread instead of starting a new one
Does it tho (I have seen a lot of forum drama that ended in a split not banning)
It's been like this since at *least* Eternal September (1993) and the only reason it might have been better before that is that "netiquette" enforcers (remember that term?) were able to bludgeon compliance into the new entrants.
OOC chat in my first MUD and it's associated forum was frequently full of weirdly hostile interactions. My generation all got on AIM as teens and broke a lot of friendships over nothing. I was an admin on Wikipedia where I dealt with people issuing death threats over articles on Irish baronets.
Here's one of my favorite examples
It's true Bluesky is full of people who are "really aggro for basically no reason" but ~ every part of the internet has been worse for my (mumble) years. Like what are people baselining against?
I can kind of wrap my head around how someone can mistakenly get stuck at part one but like, how do you not change your mind when you hear about the first kid who hangs up
They're just like us (derogatory)
🌎🧑‍🚀Wait it's all personal conflict? 🔫🧑‍🚀Always has been
Not every parent is going to get their on their own because humans are bad at trade offs but it should take basically no effort to convince.
I appreciate the thought but no, this is bare fucking minimum stuff.
bsky.app/profile/pwna...
If my kid, God forbid, felt suicidal, I absolutely would want to know before letting someone I don't know talk to them about it. But if the alternative is they don't talk to anyone, I'd rather not know about it. I honestly can't fathom how any parent could feel differently.
Go on. Try to remember the last time you watched one and cared what it said.
To be honest with you, Americans haven't really figured political parties out yet despite having them for roughly our entire existence
It doesn't!
It occurs to me the closest thing that we have is whoever it is that's supposed to do the response to the State of the Union, perhaps the worst speech in politics.
Yeah it doesn't explain a lot but I'm suggesting that what it does say still counts and what it does say is alarming.
It also feels like it should be more notable? alarming? That the President of the United States is accusing the President of Venezuela of controlling the foreign terrorist organization and just conducted a military strike on a vessel, whose alleged act of aggression was bringing over drugs.
I think that's a really important point that's lost in a lot of discussions about identity, that underlying commonality.
I also like that everybody is doing what they’re doing in order to find what works for them, but there’s still this underlying commonality across all three - we’re not different kinds of creatures, we’re pursuing a creaturely good in different kinds of ways
Also, not to pretend to be a naval knower that appears to be a boat.
Assuming this vessel was carrying drugs couldn't it have been dealt with by just you know intercepting it with one of our many ships
Apple headquarters is at One Apple Way. That is a threat.
This analogy was made in collaboration with @mtrkdjoyce.bsky.social , the good parts are hers, the weird ideas and typos are mine.
Some people are fine with a gender they were assigned at birth and never thinking hard about it. It just works. A lot of people, perhaps most are mostly fine need to make little customizations with regards to gender roles and language use etc. And some need to write their own gender kernel.
Anyway, which of these operating systems is right for you... depends! Your use cases will differ, the people you need interoperability with differ, how much time and energy you have to learn to computer differ. The question is given meaning by context. So too it is with gender.
* Mac Windows and Linux, my kingdom for an edit button.
And finally there's Linux. Linux is arcane but fully customizable. It will meet your needs exactly. You can even write the kernel yourself. Also you may have to write the kernel yourself and help for your particular problem and particular use case can be harder to find at a computer repair store.
But you may find yourself wanting something a bit more flexible. Something that lets you customize what starts up on and collaborate with people who aren't in a closed ecosystem. That's Windows. But there's a cost. You have to try harder, know more. You try things that don't work out and start over.
With a Mac you get an experience that "just works". It's aesthetically pleasing. It works basically the same way every year. You can change your wallpaper but not much else. And there are experts at the genius bar that can revert you back to the intended experience. This works for many people
Okay a paper-thin excuse to talk about a metamodel. There are basically three operating systems in increasing order of challenge and complexity: Mac, PC, and Linux (Shut up FreeBSD nerds). This is also the increasing order of customization / control And this is how we should treat gender.
But all of that stems too from our consent and respect for the other. Each set of rules is laddered on a broader set of rules for broader contexts and down at the bottom is when it's okay to try to kill each other.
In other words, you should be honest about who you are and what you believe, as part of being honest in how you deal with others. But we don't have to go full insane Kantian here. There's such thing as being restrained and polite. There are ground rules and social contexts.
So that conflict is there. That potential to be hated for something I believe, or rather something similar to what I believe is always there, always threatening. And one response to that is to hide it. But I think that's wrong because again, people have a right to not like you and what you believe.
Like a lot of the people who speak very confidentially about God's judgement upon the wicked other seem to think He can be defeated by a city ordinance removing the 10 Commandments and having a bed rep for bigotry.
I think you're right in that "God will sort us out when we die" can help a lot although it obviously can also make people even more insane about fearing judgement.
I mean
And I think it's worth doing sometimes, as a matter of personal growth and for the amazing relationships that you can discover. The rewards can be tremendous. But everyone involved has to be a true volunteer. You don't get to demand everyone be part of your eternal college growing experience.
Discovering the exact nature of a disagreement with someone is hard. It's hard and emotionally bruising even when there's only two people involved playing by high school debate rules in good faith with precise language having thought about their own positions deeply. Most people manage less.
And there's lots of times when I think my disagreeme with the choices of someone else is fairly mild that other people think I am disapproving of them to their core. And while I don't love that it's not up to me. Even if our conflict is actually fairly minor, I can't force them to find out.
I believe that some ways of living life are better than others. Not just for me in particular, but for anyone with a human bodies and human needs, and I try to live accordingly. If you think those views are antithetical to your vision of good, you have every right to hate me for it.
An accessory point to this thread, (summary: a liberal society is one where it is safe to judge and be judged because our life and liberty are secure) is we must stop fearing being judged, including as judgemental, because we have no right to the regard of others.
The reason I'm a liberal isn't because I think everyone should hold hands and sing Kumbaya- it's because I think we can build a society were we can all coexist without trying to kill and enslave each other, even if we have radically different ways of life.
You and I may have disagreements about how to live our lives that are fundamentally opposed, and we should hold tight to those disagreements to comfortable death beds in old age instead of fighting them out in the street.
There's lots of details to argue about there. But we need to have enough of a shared prepolitical understanding to have politics to argue about it. And this basic compact between people to respect and protect each others freedom has to be held without case by case adjudications or negotiations.
This extends into the modern state with free markets. Whether I approve of your habits doesn't control whether you can buy them. Whether you particularly like me doesn't control whether or not I will get social security when I retire. Who we are, our social standing, our popularity, shouldn't matter
It is with great relief that whether you approve of my lifestyle or religion and I yours is of little weight beyond how much we wish to associate (or not!).
The fundamental ethos of liberalism is not to act without judgement. The fundamental ethos of liberalism is that our judgements shouldn't constrain the life and freedom of others.
say more about this
so says claudia goldin! www.nber.org/papers/w33311
That's a hard sell to make in a cynical consumerist society, and some of you are already looking for a locker to stuff me in. But it's true and it's a human need that has not gone away and wealth has never been able to fill.
Having kids isn't for fun. There's fun stuff about it, for sure, but it's a terribly inefficient way to do that. But it is satisfying, it has meaning and purpose and if you do it right you get to meet and love and be loved by the best people in the world.
Insofar as having children is a rival form of consumption that we feel the need to do responsibly (like shopping organic or something) the trade off is worse for richer people because there are every more fun ways to spend your money with your limited time.
Arguably it's a greater shift in lifestyle with coequal parenting, since specialization can lower total burden
Somewhere in here we also need to address that married couples actually like each other more than they used to and they have a lot more consumption utils than they used to. Splitting the parenting burden between my wife still means we spend less time together and with friends than we used to.
But you know rebalancing gendered expectations is the work of generations (quite directly, you have to wait for people with old expectations to die and people with adopted gender egalitarian expectations to raise their children to think it's as normal as the air)
There's other changes that would probably be a larger change, such as gendered expectations for parenting. Fertility rates are down ~everywhere but they're significantly worse in Asia and I think it's because of how severe the change in lifestyle is for mothers.
For example, take this hideously expensive intervention that would definitely raise CFR
* If you're involved with your children The importance of money to the fertility question is not whether it changes the fundamental trade offs, it acts on the margins. But of the things that act at the margins, it is the thing we can clearly act upon with policy so we talk about it.
Happy defamation day to all who celebrate. #everydayisdefamationday
This has been happening since the W years I think.
Super excited to see what these people think about antisemitism at colleges.
I just get kirkland bacon it's fine?
This does not make it less stupid
Some people try to be understanding of xenophobes of various stripes pointing to the deepset human fear of the other and that's definitely a thing but we have to add so much more dumb shit to get what we have at play. It's not just vague fear of the other it's conspiratorial nonsense.
Many many years ago there was some woman who was caught vandalizing a mosque and apparently she was smearing the door handles with bacon or something like that which is gross for mundane oil-based reasons and also a tremendous waste of food.
Like if I wanted to be mean to a Muslim using bacon I'd just talk about how delicious it is.
The bacon thing is so fucking weird. Like how many extra steps do you have to go through to get from dietary restrictions to whatever anti Muslim magic they think they're casting?