if you just woke up from a 15-month coma to check on the Middle East, it looks like a total US victory. everyone thirsting for American blood (Iran, Russia, Hezbollah) is in shambles, US allies (Israel, Saudi, Turkey) are ascendant

the US worked long and hard to PREVENT this so, here's a quick recent-history lesson on winning vs. not:

Oct '23: I notice how strange it is that Americans only talk about ENDING wars, they seem to have forgotten that wars can end in VICTORY or in STALEMATE and that this is the crucial difference

https://x.com/yashkaf/status/1713714484169052259

it's insane that the most Kafkaesque systems in the US are those that want YOU to give THEM money. the IRS website works 30 hours a week. TreasuryDirect makes you click in your password with a mouse.

but today, ladies and gentlemen, today I tried to get health insurance step 1: the government says I'm not allowed not to have insurance (although the penalty has expired), but I'm also not really allowed to buy it directly. I go to the federal marketplace, which redirects me to the NY marketplace, which takes 30 minutes to set up a user for me

story time with some thoughts about masculinity, a🧵

in 2016 I was on a work project in Pittsburgh. with nothing to do and $50 per diem to expense, I went on OkCupid and messaged every single girl. and also Alex, who I'm not sure is a girl, but it's not zir story anyway. Alex unexpectedly showed up to our date with two friends, a couple, indignantly explaining to my raised eyebrow that "in times like these" it's unsafe for a woman to go anywhere alone and if I'm surprised it's because patriarchy purposely blinds men to dangers women face

it's baffling that so many intelligent and well-meaning people are simply incapable of thinking abt Israel vs Hamas as WAR, leading to total moral and practical confusion. war is not an online argument, or a police action, or colonialism, or national politics

here's what WAR is: 1. wars are rarely fought between equally-balanced forces. this isn't a video game

2. wars usually end with one side being defeated, allowing the victor to dictate conditions. the first condition is always: the loser can no longer conduct war or violence

https://twitter.com/yashkaf/status/1713714484169052259

we pretend to all like each other but c'mon, you know that there are some people on here you absolutely hate

time for some polls on the vibes of vitriol, the outgroups in the ingroup, the things that makes That POT not This POT

which side of the civil war will you fight for? Aella's side: individual freedom, sexual libertinism, psychedelics, no shaming allowed

Anti-Aella: enforced mores, traditional values, social conservatism, shame is good

My day job isn't actually shitposting but helping banks manage and report credit risk. Years ago I did an implementation project for a little-known bank called $SVIB...

So let me tell you a little about how diubg Fed-mandated credit risk management *well* can blow up a bank. Banks' job is to take in deposits and give out loans. But what if some of the loans go bust and can't pay you back? This is called credit risk. If debtors defaulting means that you can't pay your depositors back 100% then you are no longer a functioning bank. You need a buffer.

Been thinking about the transformation from incel to normal guy. Incels exhibit a symptom - sexlessness - but a brothel visit won't help. They espouse ludicrous beliefs, but what they're missing is not correct facts.

It's more of a spiritual frame shift, a mundane enlightenment. Incels say that 80% of men are doomed, or that you have to be 6'3", or that it's about techniques to trick women. But disproving these won't help, these are all disproven by just looking around at all the married people around for anyone who cares to look. They don't care.

Jacob's law of equal sexual oppression/privilege: in societies where hetero-monogamy is the norm dating/sex/marriage will be equally difficult and equally rewarding for men and women as a whole

I will offer 3 arguments to support this belief: empirical, theoretical, and moral This is not an ironclad law of nature and either of the arguments can be (and are, every day) nitpicked. But I hope that together they may convince you that this can't be very far from the truth, and it's good to adopt the stance that it is true given no strong evidence against.

I can think of no worse way to live. This is as bad a self-made purgatory as you can craft for yourself, a guarantee of anxious misery. The mere act of leaving productive life behind to move to some island reinforces for you that everyone you love will soon die and humanity will go extinct. Your entire identity is now bound in this belief, you have abandoned all hope.

But the first day is actually the best day.

What makes a compatible couple, similarity or complementarity of opposites?

Almost everyone pays lip service to both, and almost everyone then proceeds to ignore the latter and focus only on the former. And I think this is missing much more than half the picture. Pretty much anyone doing "data oriented" matchmaking, from dating apps to arranged marriage peddlers toPMP is looking at variables where people who like each other are similar and agree on, and then hopes to apply this to matchmaking. This doesn't work. research.peoplematching.org

Pax Americana is so unbelievably effective at keeping the world's chaos from affecting Americans' lives that a lot of them utterly forget that it exists and wonder what the DoD even does with all that money most places in the world things like Russian expansionism, Chinese aggression, Islamic terror, drug gangs, resource shortages, trade wars, ethnic violence etc have a very real effect on your life and you can't afford to ignore them. but if you live in Austin or SF you easily can

this is a good thread explaining both the details of a new persuasion method and how it is fired at us at scale when there's money and elections at stake

the implied conclusion to this is usually "social media is brainwashing us, stay off it". but I have a different take

https://twitter.com/St_Rev/status/1573226996859129856

tailored social media propaganda is observably persuading more and more people. are we all doomed to be brainwashed by it? doomsayers like YN Harari are claiming that this is already the case, that resistance is futile

but can't exposure to this also inoculate you against it?

all this talk about ask culture (asking directly for what you want, being ok with rejection) vs guess culture (indirectly implying what you want hoping to be offered it) is out of touch with the average American who doesn't have wants

https://twitter.com/SpencrGreenberg/status/1551305444177711106

this discussion assumes agentic people who have clear desires and know them. actual people have repressed desires, Girardian mimesis, Lacanian envy, or they avoid having desires altogether as a subconscious defense against having to pursue them actively and possibly failing

jargon is good actually. specialized and precise terms are crucial for bridging inferential distances, eliminating the illusion of transparency, and compressing knowledge. if you want to learn complicated shit you should be jargonmaxxing doctors know shit you don't and use medical jargon to talk about it. AI safety people know shit you don't and use "orthogonal" to talk about it. insisting that it means "unrelated" or that "agentic" means "active" is just a social sneer or an admission of intellectual laziness

a tweet that starts with "am I the only one" and gets 1 million likes must be expressing a truly universal sentiment. does this say something important about Gen Z or is it just a meme?

I can actually think of several possibilities and I honestly don't know which ones are true THEORY 1
white collar work is great and zoomers know it, most of these 1 million likes were from people on their phone during those "exhausting" 8-9 work hours, this sort of dramatic collective griping is just a fun cultural expression to participate in

people often say that public corporations are too short-termist. unlike partnerships or family businesses which steward future decades, the impatient shareholders and CEOs of corporations can't to see beyond the next quarter's earnings

so let's talk about FC Barcelona Barca are owned by their 140,000 "socios", who each had to demonstrate years of loyalty to the club or family ties to another member. It has been of the most successful sports clubs in history, winning trophies and employing some of the world's best players for a century.

my zoomer friends are entirely allergic to the idea of a 9-5 (aka 10-3 if you're remote) with health insurance at some anonymous co. they're all doing idiosyncratic hustles or questionable startups or living with their parents while "figuring things out" nothing against this in general - follow your passion etc and it makes them more interesting to hang out with except Brooklyn rents are gonna go up 20% this year and they'll all get priced out all the way back to Michigan

My career advice for losers:

1. Accept that you're a loser. Yes, you. Stop it, you're being clueless.

2. Don't work anywhere for status/fame/respect: the entertainment industry, luxury fashion, politics, academia. That's clueless exploitation.
astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-… 3. If you have technical skills (can code, can do Excel, can read a legal document) find an anonymous but profitable mid-size company, put in minimum viable effort, and get paid enough to retire in 10-15 years.

The world is full of liars, more than enough to point out and teach your kids about deception

The world is full of marvels, more than enough to point out and teach your kids about wonder

Neither of those is remotely a good reason to lie to your kids Honesty costs you upfront, but it has incredible compounding returns over time. Your relationship with your kids will last decades and decades. Do you really want bullshit over honesty for decades for some temporary goal or because you think Santa is cool?

https://twitter.com/yashkaf/status/1472250669197410310

Uncle Ted's characteristics of "leftism":

1. Low self esteem, which leads to identification with victims and hatred of competition
2. Collectivism, desire to spread their moral beliefs to all of society and solve all individual problems at the highest collective level I think that this is an interesting diagnosis of *some* group, but I'm not sure it maps quite cleanly on what we would consider left-wing causes and movements in politics today. The reason I think this is from a particular kind of personal experience.

the overarching theme of @kaschuta's podcast is: "liberalism has destroyed the constraints that prevented defect-defect equilibria in traditional societies" one the episode with @CovfefeAnon they talked about how marriage is *supposed* to be coercive to prevent young wives from cheating on their husbands and husbands from dumping their old wives. without this coercion everyone is confused and insecure and not having babies