Hanging Out and On

Was FaceTiming with a Turkish friend of mine I’ve never met in person the other day. She warned me that she was really “huggy” and a “hanger on” of her friends, and asked if that was ok when we visit in person.

I said something like: “I don’t know how I could possibly withstand an attractive, intelligent and affectionate 25-year-old woman hugging and hanging on me. Oh, the horror. How will I ever deal with the terrible trauma of this?”

She got the message that I was good with it, I think. At least she laughed a lot.

Whine Baby Whine

Agreed. Time to get over the whiny baby fear of this. It’s the answer to many problems, with not as many downsides as the other solutions.

Too Old to Care

Aella is going to get into Big Trouble with this. She’s writing in areas that are or are close to dangerous knowledge that most liberals wish to suppress.

I’m too old to care who this makes angry anymore, but I do suspect there are salient genetic-level intelligence potential differences between ethnic groups, but those divides are probably not as neat as wished, nor present only in the places we’d suspect.

For instance, since groups in Africa are so varied genetically, I’d guess that if you removed disease/parasite load and poverty, some African groupings would land well above the white average and some below. Humanity has way, way more natural variation than the racists and the anti-racists believe.

I understand why research on this and knowledge about it is suppressed. Historically, it had only led to bad outcomes and rarely anything good. The real problem with this prohibition, though, is that once you do so, you’ve ceded all the ground here to racists and eugenicists and you have no valid defense, and in fact can’t even think about the topic anymore.

That is in a nutshell the whole problem with Dangerous Knowledge.

The Will

This is a really great thread. Every UI/UX designer should read it but they won’t because the field has fully failed now.

She doesn’t mention Firefox at all, but the designers thereof did every absurd and wrong thing she mentions in this thread, and a few more besides. I don’t think people realize how much software could achieve if anyone allowed it to do so. Give me a few billion dollars and I could fairly easily build things that no one would believe possible now. We have the technology. We have the knowledge. But as with many things in our present moment of “nothing is possible” catastrophism, we just do not have the will.

Hayes of Confusion

I think like 80% of liberals and 60% of conservatives would be perfectly amenable to bringing back the Hayes Code — but an even more restrictive version. The lib au courant thinking is that no work should have any “problematic” characters or situations in it.

So many prudes. So much fail.

Gebrochen

Damn, so true.

I’ve broken computers in ways you can’t even conceive of.

Trap House

I feel seen.

On a more somber note, I re-watched the scene the other day where Saoirse Ronan’s character in The Lovely Bones realizes she’s trapped with no escape from the killer’s murder den. Damn, that is painful to view — but great acting by Saoirse and Stanley Tucci. Such an excruciating scene.

No hysterics. She panics like most real people really panic. Tucci later said filming this scene caused him psychological trauma and I can understand why.

Shunned

People are like “masks solve everything!” And then you look at a country’s vax rate and it’s terrible, and see that most of the spread/hospitalization is among the unvaxxed, and you wonder what they are playing at.

Man, “experts.” What do we do about their compulsive need to distort and outright lie “for your own good?” Is there a viable way around it at this point, while not descending into anti-vax anti-science conspiracizing?