arcticdementor - Tumblr blog

[arcticdementor]

[arcticdementor]

Brazilification

To slightly paraphrase something I said over at the Motte, we need to be worried less about becoming more like Brazil the South American country, and worried more about becoming more like Brazil the Terry Gilliam film.

[arcticdementor]

i love how since liking anime/fanservice/porn is now hip in chronically online leftist circles they're trying to memory hole that weird period between like 2011 and 2018 where they would screech constantly about how anime was problematic/gross/paedophila or whatever instead of just admitting they were full of shit

[arcticdementor]

xhs

[arcticdementor]

Berlin is maybe the only city I've been in thats in the same natural category as nyc. I feel like by the numbers london deserves to be on the list but it is a truth univerdalky acknowledged that London kind of sucks (possible explanation: the British are a fundamentally provincial people and only developed a true metropolis by aping America)

[arcticdementor]

oh NO

[arcticdementor]

To guarantee material security and allow a woman to seem helpless and incapable of earning a living, two to three children are necessary. This minimizes the risk of old age without children or grandchildren who prove their respect and love, their gratitude to her for being such a good mother and grandmother. Besides, the children keep each other amused, leaving mother free for 'superior" occupations, sewing, for example, or baking. Her maternal care consists of locking the children in a room together and coming in only when one of them gets hurt and screams loud enough to summon her. It follows that raising and training two or more children is much easier than bringing up one. To instill obedience into an only child, the mother has to evolve complex methods to outsmart and persuade it, and get it to see reason; or it has to be punished. Since this is a nuisance, a mother usually leaves it to the father. Several children, on the other hand, can be trained by emotional blackmail. As they are all dependent on their mother's approval, she has only to show a slight preference for one and the others will do anything she tells them to. Every child lives in constant fear that its mother will withdraw her 'love' and give it to someone else. And if this fear does not create affection between siblings (as if woman would care!), it at least increases their competitiveness and performance. Even later, when the children have long since grown up. they will still vie with each other for their mother's respect. The sons satisfy their ambitions in their work, the daughters in the amassing of property. From time to time they all gather together and return to mother. Mother, of course, regards this as a sign of their affection and likes to call the interest her children take in each other's progress 'a sense of family.' On such occasions each renders an accounting of his or her latest acquisitions.

—Esther Vilar, The Manipulated Man (1971)

[arcticdementor]

It's funny. I don't own a car, and I have plenty to complain about how it's hard to get around this city on foot, and how terrible our public transit is…

…and yet, every single time I encounter them, I inevitably end up on the opposite side of the argument from the anti-car urbanists.

being so fr with you all we need to drastically accelerate anti-car propaganda.

we need to make it so clear to future generations that we no longer tolerate a world where you cannot conveniently go for a walk or get a coffee or get groceries without a car

[arcticdementor]

That bit about "normal milestones of adulthood" reminded me of the poster at the old Motte subreddit who responded to a post asking about these negative trends by arguing, at length, an extreme mix of straight-up "sour grapes" (homeownership, friendship, marriage, parenthood, etc.) and denial of trends (suicide rates, self-reported happiness, etc.) as merely increasing honesty.

Hanania.

[arcticdementor]

I used to think I was rather misanthropic…

…but compared to some of the people I encounter online, particularly in the 'AI enthusiast' and 'left-leaning "rootless cosmopolitan" PMC' spaces…

[arcticdementor]

I’m not angry or anything but I am genuinely curious what the proper etiquette is here lol. I feel like when I’m driving and the person/people in the back are not having a good time (or having too good of a time) I try to like give them some privacy by turning the music up so we can pretend I can’t hear them.

Although I think once or twice a girl has been crying and I sheepishly asked “uhh… is everything okay?” It feels like a risky move lol. Maybe they’re crying openly because they want someone to ask what’s wrong. But maybe they don’t!

[arcticdementor]

@pureamericanism said:

 I don’t know about you, but video games had already trained me to enjoy the “number goes up/down” “achievement unlocked! you can now lift x/run y” element of physical fitness.

Not a gamer, and I don't really have that urge.

And let me go into even more clarity: what does losing weight benefit be?

Looking better? For what? My dating prospects will always be zero, most of my friends I only talk to once or twice a year, by phone at that.

Mobility? Why? It's not like I have places to go, really.

Longevity? Why would I want to make my miserable existence last longer? The sooner it's over, the better, and worsening my obesity would help with that.

Why shouldn't I 'eat myself to death,' since I want to die?

Weight Loss

I've been struggling, for the past 18 or so years, to try to lose the ~150 pounds of weight I gained when I first went on antipsychotics (a known and common side-effect of that class of medication). Now, I'm finding myself losing the will to keep trying. Why bother trying? Why not just let the fat pack on?

[arcticdementor]

leftists when white supremacists are virulently antisemitic: if there’s four people sitting at a table with a nazi, there are five nazis.

leftists when islamists, arab supremacists, and leftists are virulently antisemitic: well of course there’s bad actors at every protest, and anyway these are just outside provocateurs, and they didn’t do anything really, but if they did it’s because those jews fucking deserved it

[arcticdementor]

[arcticdementor]

They. They forgor

[arcticdementor]

[arcticdementor]

If Twitter actually starts requiring new accounts (and perhaps existing ones later on) to pay a fee in order to be able to like or post, I don’t want to see a single right winger praising Elon again because this is magnitudes worse than anything that happened under the previous management

It’s not about having to pay, it’s the fact that this essentially ends anonymity on the site - forget about VPNs, there will always be a payment with your name on it tied to your account that can be used to identify you.

Don’t delude yourself into thinking you can pay anonymously online in the current year, you can’t (they’re certainly not going to allow Monero, and apart from that crypto is basically KYC’d to the point where you will have to use your real name at some point of the process). That makes it trivially easy for malicious governments to get the real identity of posters and leaves even the most careful of VPN users one data breach away from being identified.