A country feels more egalitarian when people in “low-status” positions are the same kind of people that are in “high-status” positions. It feels like everyone is in on the same project together and making a contribution. It also ensures less exploitation in low status roles.

https://twitter.com/kunley_drukpa/status/1943721083443851661

I think the steelman of the DEI concept is that this egalitarian feeling can be recreated by engineering and maintaining a proportional mix of different types in different roles. But it doesn’t work, it requires constant discrimination to maintain (which pisses everyone off), and no group is ever satisfied with the lot that they have been assigned.

About 10 years ago the New Yorker published a long essay detailing the slavery operation that puts a Chinese restaurant in every small town across America. Then nobody did anything about it and everyone forgot.

https://twitter.com/graduatedben/status/1943515451335618895

Among the disturbing details is that these workers are trafficked in to operate the restaurants, they are not typically paid, they live in dilapidated housing provided by restaurant network (or in the back room), and they are regularly moved from town to town to prevent them from forming connections and relationships in the town

Let me tell you the story, as best I can remember it, of the first person to ever block me.

I was a baby account and I noticed that a lot of apparently interesting and smart people followed this particular person, so I did too. I immediately recognized her as a highly curious person with a propensity toward edgelordism. My kind of people!

Then she posted a poll question. I don’t remember the exact question but it was something like this:

“100 people are infected by parasitic worms. The worms are slowly eating through their flesh until they erupt from their eyes, blinding them forever. UNLESS — you stop them. The way that you stop them is by raping a 5 year old. The five year old has Down’s syndrome and will have no memory of the incident. No one will ever know. What do you do?”

I replied to her, “what do you hope to learn from this so called thought experiment? This just seems evil and pointless as a question to ask.”

The account replied to me, “I want people to suffer.”

Then she blocked me.

The name of that account, as you have already guessed, was Aella. And I believe she was at least partially telling me the truth about her intentions.

Fin I personally believe that there exist all manner of spiritual forces and energies in the world and that experiencing childhood sexual abuse and doing lots of psychedelics are risk factors for welcoming those energies/entities into your own being.

When I see someone declare “I want people to suffer” and continually advocate for things that will result in horrible suffering in vulnerable (neuroatypical) people, I don’t see “she’s just a sincere nerd” as the Occam’s razor explanation for why.

I recognize a part of aella that is to me a kind of “kindred spirit” and I can only pray that she can somehow free herself from the malevolent energies that are working through her

A bunch of people trying to tell me copious dairy was a luxury. WRONG. do you know how many folk tales and songs there are about milking the cow? Do you know how much milk a cow produces? I have an old family butter churn and it comes up to my WAIST. Probably 5 gallons!

If you’re European the foundation of your ancestral diet is dairy

“Stop Asian Hate” was preposterous. Has there ever been so blatant an attempt to meme nonexistent bigotry into existence in order to shore up a fracturing political coalition When a framing is overblown, minimizing is correct

The thing to understand about sundress gate is that obviously men think women look cute in sundresses and most women (rightly?) find it threatening to their core sense of identity and agency if they overtly wear something men like.

It’s much more important that their female friends like their choices, and anything Girly risks the wrath of friends for pick-me behavior. To appeal directly to male sexuality without first going the filter of female consensus is traitorous to the sisterhood.

Take a look at this image:

What you have here are two warring social dominance strategies. One woman attempts to mog with a direct (cheap, tacky) appeal to male sexuality, and another woman mogs by stepping in to punish with consensus judgment of women and gays. Owned! The reason for the constantly churning fashion conversation among women isn’t to look good for men — that would be far too easy — but to navigate/define the permission structures whereby other women will refrain from punishing your appeal to men

Pictured: Cappuccino in the 00’s vs cappuccino today.

People think millennials haven’t achieved a lot but it’s actually crazy how much BETTER food is now compared to 20 years ago. Millennial talent went into food and beverage arts. Now you may think this insignificant, but I disagree. This is one of the highest callings.
Total Hipster Victory is most visible in mogging with vital upgrades to the most basic, affordable, and “low-brow” everyday foodstuffs: coffee, pizza, ramen, beer, bread, cheese. Now that we have won this progress we have to fight entropy to keep it.

I only started tweeting in 2019 but I lurked for 5 years before, and my observation is OG frogtwitter clique (2cb, bap, fisted, Loki, landshark, tacos, Braddock, etc) is the only posting clique to have stood the test of time without purity spiraling into schism.

How did they manage this? I am not really in this clique but hopefully they don’t mind me sharing what I notice about what makes them successful.

I think it’s because they never thought of themselves as a “political movement” but rather a gang of friends that share a rhetorical sensibility and a sense of humor, and so they don’t require ideological purity of one another, in fact they disagree often, and not just about small things. But you see, online you don’t HAVE a friend until you disagree with them and find out the friend is STILL THERE.

Ironically it’s the people who think of themselves as a serious Movement have difficulty holding their scene together, while those who are here for shitposting and lulz in an intellectual free zone have a chance at cultural influence.

Rampant purity testing is stultifying to any intellectual free space, as it is a form of moralfagging Lomez riffing on a similar observation in this very good thread

https://twitter.com/L0m3z/status/1791555448526770617

The NPR mind depends entirely upon “things that seem one way but are really the other way” which is a seductive trap because it makes you feel intelligent by giving you the lofty sensation of self-overcoming

https://twitter.com/PYeerk/status/1672170679674839040

People become addicted to the Surprising But True! not only because it makes them smarter than others but primarily because disregarding your gut feeling is a Moral Victory

if you see this tweet, quote it with 4 pics that expose your taste in women

https://twitter.com/yungdiscodrip/status/1641521987733299208

Respectfully I disagree, I specifically had to exit the twin peaks universe to pick Laura Dern not only because Dern has that inexplicable soulful energy but also because Laura Palmer was mid

https://twitter.com/zebbart/status/1641784229812920322

Antisemitism is a huge deal in the lower IQ parts of the online right but it peters out in smarter corners. I think this is because talented tenth goys get filtered into contexts that reward high intelligence, and encounter jews. They soon find their best friends are Jewish. I don’t make the rules

To believe in “social construction” Is to understand oneself as radically vulnerable to memetic contagion. The normative water in which we swim radically shapes fates for good or ill.

It follows that social conservatives are the ONLY people who take social construction seriously When a liberal uses the phrase “social construction” she means to say that the thing or value under discussion is not *real*

“The difference in upper body strength is socially constructed”

“The taboo on child sexuality is socially constructed”

Women are more authoritarian than men Women are more antidemocratic than men