Month: August 2024

Gap Years

Chill Clowns, Rant

I think age gap romantic relationships are beneficial to the vast majority of people1, but even more than that I think age gap friendships are far more beneficial than the romantic variety. It saddens me to see so many people say it’s “creepy” that, for example, someone 38 is friends is with someone 21. That seems to be the majority view, at least in the US. Other countries don’t insist on such strict and dogmatically-enforced age segregation — and in fact find it odd how bizarrely age-segregated the US is when they visit here.

This is completely platonic I’m talking about here, by the way. (Though I think Americans place too much importance on sex and its meaning too.)

Even more than we should normalize age gap romantic entanglements, I think we should make age gap friendships almost a requirement as there is so much benefit to be had from the perspective and experience of someone who has been around the bend a few more times than you have.

Also, I liked this comment:

Why in hell do so many people think that people of varying ages are completely different species? I just truly cannot fucking understand. I have never, ever found this to be the case. Hell, at my old job I had far more in common with the interns in their 20s (when I was early- to mid-40s) than any of the people in my age range.

Guess I will keep ranting about this forever because nothing about the modern discourse matches any of my experience.

  1. Yes, including women. They are not in fact fragile children.

Chill Links

Harris Was Hamstrung by Caution. Now She’s the Democrats’ Driving Force.

How Israel Killed a Ghost. Hezbollah’s commander Fuad Shukr lived a life so secret few knew his name or face before an airstrike killed him and helped put the Middle East on the brink of war.

Americans’ IQ scores are trending in a downward direction. In fact, they’ve been falling for over a decade.

Harris’ Campaign Is Working—Get Used to It.

Zelensky says Ukraine ‘getting stronger’ in Kursk as his troops blow up second bridge.

Colleges Can’t Say They Weren’t Warned.

ANPC’s Transponder Landing System (TLS) equips runways that are inhospitable to standard ILSs, like the ones at McMurdo, with a full Category I ILS approach.

Could Quit

Chill Culture

It’s quite clear that the reaction to Haidt’s1 claims about smartphones — even the “scientific” ones — are those of the addict’s defensive riposte to being told that their nasty habit is harmful to everything and everyone around them.

  1. Obviously correct.

Denial Style

Chill Clowns

Climate change denialism and NIMBYism are birds of a feather1 because both are about the renunciation of and attempted prevention of necessary change.

  1. Not a 100% correlation, as Kevin Drum demonstrates.

Left Behind

Chill Culture, Politics

This is from a conservative perspective I do not share, but I still agree with the overall take. Secularism is dominant now. Religion has been largely vanquished. The left as much as the right has reacted poorly to this, attempting to replace old-fashioned Protestantism with its even-more-inferior substitute, wokism. Except it’s not been done with any sort of awareness or forethought, as the vast majority of the left doesn’t understand that there is a religion-shaped hole in their lives they are attempting to fill.

Religious urges seem to be nearly universal in the human soul1. Attempting to eliminate them only makes those compulsions emerge in a more dangerous, less controlled form elsewhere. This is also true on the right, where we see worship of a two-bit fraud like Donald Trump and other pathologies.

  1. Part of that human nature the left claims we do not have.

Non-friends With Low Standards

Chill Politics

Trump is held to a much lower standard than Harris1. That has been true of every election Trump has participated in. We have a terrible press corps, really. It’s not wholly their fault, but a lot of this divergence is in fact on them.

  1. However, I think that focusing on grocery prices — especially in the context of anti-trust enforcement — is a great idea.

People Like Owning Slaves

Chill Rant

A lot of the RTO push is just that many people like owning slaves. RTO is as close as they can get to that in this era. A lot of people with a bit of power are sociopaths because power attracts their brand of mental illness, and those types would all own slaves if they could.

Being able to control lives, to force people into long commutes, to lord over them like they are in charge of medieval barony, to regulate their going and coming — that is the RTO-pushing wannabe-slaveowners’ stuff of dreams. It is the only thing that excites them, that vivifies their lives. You can tell by how lustfully they talk about RTO.

There’s nothing anyone can do to ever get me back in an office again. You want the best, I’m working wherever the fuck I wish to. You want some chowdearheaded doof who can’t distinguish an MTU from a CPU, go ahead and hire your slave type. I’m sure your network and prod environment will stay up very reliably then.

Crumble

Chill Clowns

Anyone who talks about how wonderful and glorious Putin is and who does not live in Russia should be:

1) Required to emigrate to Russia.

2) Required to sign up for the Russian armed forces.

Those two requirements would probably solve that problem.

Ok, ok, I’m not really serious. But damn, such clownishness should be punished somehow.

Chill Quote

There was neither nonexistence nor existence
then; there was neither the realm of space nor the
sky which is beyond.
What stirred?
Where?
In whose protection?
Was there water, bottomlessly deep?
There was neither death nor immortality then.
There was no distinguishing sign of night or day.
That one breathed, windless, by its own impulse.
Other than that there was nothing beyond.
Darkness was hidden by darkness in the
beginning…

“The Hymn of the Dark Beginning,” from the Hindu Rigveda (c. 1500 BCE)