Month: February 2021

Road Trip

Chill Uncategorized

Unless the sidewalk is absolutely filled shoulder-to-shoulder with people, outside with a mask on yourself, your risk is very, very, very minimal from incidental exposure — even considering the new SARS-CoV-2 variants.

You are almost certainly more at risk in a US city from walking in the road than from Covid-19.

Even smart people have just shockingly bad risk assessment capabilities.

Right Here Right Now

Chill Uncategorized

I’m not sure I liked the 90s better, but it was the last time of general, society-wide optimism about the future and what we could achieve together.

That was all crushed, annihilated by the end of the 1990s and into the early 2000s. The uncontested rise of neoliberalism to complete dominance and the ascendance of the algorithm just torpedoed that. And also a major contributor of course was identity politics and its re-segregating absurdities.

It’s hard for me to explain to people too young to remember or not yet born how it felt in 1989 after the Berlin Wall fell and the possibility of a better world opened before us. Racism and sexism seemed in retreat. The economy was booming. People were living longer, better lives. Yes, there were still problems but it genuinely felt like we could and would solve them.

We squandered it all. We let the plutes and the worst of us extinguish that possibility and that hope. Now even liberals are safety-obsessed, content to hide away from the light like Morlocks, wanting to take away long-distance travel, decent food, and any chance of raising people up with more fulfilling, richer lives. Nowadays, even the liberals are perfectly content to tell us how we must be reduced and diminished for our own good.

When I woke up every day in 1993, I felt hope for the future. When I wake up now, I’m just surprised there is still a future to concern myself with.

Zey Key

Chill Uncategorized

I am so glad I knew about Zeynep Tufecki before the pandemic. She saved me much stupidity and wrongness.

But the sad thing is that being right doesn’t matter when so many other idiots are so fucking wrong (their “masks don’t work” and anti-vax BS, etc.).

Slosh

Chill Uncategorized

I think where I started to part ways with modern feminism is that during the mid- to late-2000s, there was the idea that consent can’t be given when people are drunk. I don’t agree with this completely, but ok, I can see where this is coming from. If my partner wants to have sex with me when I’m drunk, go to it. I don’t care.

However, what caused the beginning of the rift is that many feminists were adamant that if the woman was sober and the man drunk, the woman bore no responsibility at all, but if the man was sober and the woman even had a slight bit of alcohol, this proved the man was a bad and evil rapist.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I guess this is where mainstream feminism turned away from equality and towards whatever it’s concerned with now, which has nothing to do with anything I care about.

No Vaxillation

Chill Regular-ass Post

Yeah, those vaccines. No one thought they’d be this good. That’s amazing. Can’t wait to get mine.

Once Upon

Chill Regular-ass Post

Is Culture Stuck? Things Have Been Looking the Same.

It made me think about what was the last good new movie I saw. I think it’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Why did I like it? I don’t know. It wasn’t because it was about the plot which centered around the Charles Manson murders. The film seemed to use it as an excuse. An excuse for what? Just to transport you to Tarantino’s lavishly reconstructed LA in 1969 with cars, drive-ins, hot hairy hippie chicks, Margot Robbie’s starlet blonde, Bruce Lee, Brad Pitt playing a cool guy stunt driver and DiCaprio as a former cowboy on his own TV series but is now on a downward career arc. The viewer is transported to a place and time that was filled with cool characters. People looked different, talked different and there was cultural trends happening that were specific to that era.

I really enjoyed that movie; one of the better ones I’ve seen in the last few years. It had no plot to speak of, not did it need one. What it did is completely succeed in making the foreign actually feel foreign. That was a very different time — the people and their concerns were not the same as ours. Their Weltanschauung was completely divergent from our own, and Tarantino is one of the few directors I’ve ever seen successfully capture this.

If you are under the age of 30 you may think things are normal. But to someone who has lived 3 decades or more you may notice something odd: we haven’t had a shift like we did in the past. Culture is frozen. Throughout the 20th century we had changes almost every decade. Changes in fashion, in music, in aesthetics, hairstyles, style of comedy, television shows and movies. It sort of felt like someone was directing society from the top down, dictating a big shift every 10 years to something new.

Yes, it is really strange how little culture has shifted in a lot of ways. There have been lurches to increased prudishness and such, but a lot of major things haven’t changed at all since the mid-2000s. As a child of the 1970s, it’s hard to explain to people how quickly fashion and culture changed back then! Because it just does not now. Not even a global pandemic seems to be doing much in that regard.

No Hexercise

Chill Regular-ass Post

This is correct.

However, I’d still advise changing it up so what you’re doing doesn’t get stale. This leads to better results over time as you are more likely to keep with the program. Those exercises, though, will produce maximum results with minimum time. They are foundational, most of them are compound, and all transalate quite well to real-world strength (despite what you may have been told by people who, surprise, don’t work out).

Right To Suffer

Chill Uncategorized

Yeah. Even though I have some libertarian and, rarely, some right-wing (not alt-right) sympathies, this is why I could never be part of that faction: all too many of them are literal sadists. They like watching people suffer. Especially if those people are women, or black, or trans. They don’t just look the other way, like some liberals/Dems do. No, they actively enjoy it and want it to occur. They enjoy seeing kids in cages, watching the “wrong” people get bombed into oblivion, and want the poor and the homeless to suffer “for their own good.”

To be clear, not all of them are this way. But if you want to go where the vast majority of the actual sadists are, you go to the right.

In Transit

Chill Regular-ass Post

I wonder how much of the left’s utter obsession with trans issues was seeded by the plute class to sap energy from more substantive issues that could actually alter the status quo.

Because if I were in the plute class, that’s what I’d be doing. It’d pay off and has paid off. Betcha that’s been happening and is still ongoing.