FBXL Social

I sure hope not, if I'm paying for a bra, I want it to be right off the production line.

If I'm being totally honest, one of the things that annoys me the most is when people try to attack other people's masculinity as a way to bully them into doing something. How many women have tried to use this tactic? Postmodern women telling men that if they don't get their way it means that those men are less a man?

Still, I don't think that we should make the mistake of refusing to define masculinity just because a definition can be used against us. So I think one of the definitions of how a man should be is the risk taker -- biologically, compared to women there's a much lower chance of men passing on their genetics, and so if you want to be part of the future you have to fight. You don't get a spot in the future for free. That's why men are the soldiers, why they're there entrepreneurs, why they are the ones who hop on rickety ships to new continents to make their fortunes. That's why when the Hun is at the gates, you hide the women and children, and send the men to fight.

And by taking those chances, some men end up having devastating poor outcomes, but other men have devastatingly good outcomes. We take the risks, we reap the rewards for success, and we faced the punishments for failure. That is the lot in life for a man. Take risks, strive for greatness, and many of us fail, but a few of us succeed and take all the spoils.

Now some people might think that this isn't correct, but you have twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors. It's the reality of the world.

So Western society has feminized men, and I think that one of the best ways of showing that is the fact that men don't want to take risks anymore. Men are just as risk-averse as women typically are. That's not a good thing. For one thing, when men aren't taking the risks and building the skyscrapers and discovering the new discoveries that make them and the world rich, women having innate instinct to take risks because somebody has to. Throughout most of history, women have been particularly conservative, but in these areas where men become feminized and don't take risks anymore and society stops growing, that's when they start becoming risk takers. Ideology aside, it is typically a sign that a society is in critical condition and is on the verge of either collapse or revolution.

And if there was anything that represents the loss of the masculine risk-taking, I would say it's actually marriage. When you ask many men why they don't want to get married they'll tell you a story about how risky it is. Maybe it is, but most men will write themselves out of History if they aren't taking risks, and marriage is one of those risks. Not that everyone needs to get married, but if the reason that you're not getting married is because you're scared to take a risk I think that you've lost the plot -- taking risks is your nature.

Another thing that I've come to believe is that fatherhood is also our nature. People like the red pillars and the pickup artists often end up looking at the society from over 250,000 years ago, when we were still mostly apes. At that time, the most effective reproductive strategy was to as a man impregnate as many women as possible, because the pregnant woman would be able to go off and raise the child after giving birth just fine without you. What happened about 200,000 years ago is the brain of humans got too big. That has a few consequences. For one, it means that pregnant women are more vulnerable than most pregnant females of other species. For another, the infants of modern humans spend more time more defenseless than any other creature on earth. If you have a dog that's a couple years old, usually that dogs almost fully sized. If you have a baby that's a couple years old, many of them still can't walk or talk. Because of this the ideal breeding strategy changed, and instead of men doing the old pump and dump, the men who stayed with their women and provided for them, protected them, and provided for their woman and their child end up having the most successful offspring.

Of course there's some wiggle room in there, genes are selfish as the book famously posited, and so there is a prosocial way of doing this and an antisocial way where the women get impregnated by Chad and have Pat raise the child (not Patrick, just pat). In this way, the woman can have Chad's baby, Chad has more offspring, and the only one who really comes out of it poorly is poor Pat.

But again, that's one of the risks in life. You have to try not to be naive, you have to try to learn as much as you can about the world and understand things well enough that you don't end up in these weird situations, but you have to take the risks because otherwise the meaning of your life is to consume resources, to rack up debts, to pay them back, and to die.

This new style of fatherhood does have some real benefits though. Unlike the approach of 250,000 years ago, the man suddenly have a say in the culture their children inherit. Instead of inseminating the women and then dying, they get to pass on something equally important than genetics, they get to pass on culture and in the process they get to build culture.

Statistically speaking we know the power of fathers. We know that kids without fathers are absurdly overrepresented in prisons, we know that they end up running away from home more often, we know that the girls end up more promiscuous, and we know that the boys end up taking the girls without permission a lot more often. And that's just the latent and statistical power of a father. It's the average power of the average father.

But imagine if instead of trying to be an average father you try to be an exceptional father. That's a risk. There's absolutely no guarantee that doing so is going to result in anything positive. Kids with very good Fathers end up with bad endings early on in life, because sometimes the world just isn't fair. But again, as a man you have to take those risks because otherwise you're going to be written out of History. In this case not just genetically, but culturally. A lot of people think that Star wars is way more important than it really is. Or marvel. Or the latest election. Or most of the things in the news. For most people none of that stuff actually matters. For most people there's nothing you can do to affect it, it's just something that happens somewhere else or it's meaningless pictures on a screen. Your memory of watching that movie will die with you if it even lasts that long. On the other hand, the effect of being an exceptional father can lay the groundwork for generations. You teach your child from the moment that they're born what it means to be a man through your actions. Later on you get a chance to speak to them with stories, tell them things with words, and it's built into your children but you will have an impact on them if you try. A lot of people talk about intergenerational trauma, but not a lot of people talk about the opposite. Everyone focuses on the idea of a father beating their children, and then that passes down as a child beating their child and so on and so forth, but good parents who teach good lessons to Good children are likely to go on to have reasonably successful lives of their own, and then their children will be raised right, and a virtuous cycle will result. Maybe. There's no guarantees, that's not how life works. It's a risk.

But if you take my view of the world that you need to listen to the little voice inside of you, I know for me putting my all into everything that I'm doing, doing my best not to try to do the same or slightly better than the other fathers around me but to envision what great fatherhood might look like and strive for that ideal, even if you don't always hit the ideal and even if the outcomes aren't necessarily what you'd like them to be, you can look at yourself in the mirror and be proud of the person that you are living as. Deep satisfaction of doing a difficult job, doing it to the very best of your ability, and taking care of that ancient and sacred duty that's written into your blood. If you imagine yourself as the particular moment in Time where the spark of life has been passed, and behind you lies all of the humans who are your ancestors, and all of the hominids before them, and all of the mammals before them, going all the way back to the first single-celled organism, and you are taking that torch that has been handed to you for a short period of time and passing it on to the next life in the chain, making you insignificant and yet deeply significant, just one piece of a long line, but a line that ends with you if you fail. People are looking for meaning, I'm not sure there is a greater meaning than that. What greater purpose can there be in life then passing the torch of life and the torch of culture and adding your own kindling to the fire?

In the end, however you live your life, there are two paths. You either bet on the future or you don't. For some people, they are perfectly happy to get a job, rack up loans, pay back those loans, retire for a few years, then die without anyone particularly caring. But honestly, if you've read this far into one of my big essays, I bet you that you're the sort of person that I want to see there in the future with me, so why not take that bet? At the end of the day if you fail all you can do is die anyway.

Pictured: Civilizing souls using fat man powers

I think the most important thing is to not piss of Gandhi, he'll definitely nuke your ass.

(Now there's a joke most people won't get)

WHAT THE HEIL?!

Is this what Kamala means when she keeps on saying she grew up in a middle class household?

Youtubers kept on using "Why Does Nobody Remember Me in This World?" as an example of a forgettable anime this season, but I actually loved it. One of my favorites of the summer season. I wonder if it'll get a second season?

And? Nothing that I said violates the laws of nature. I described the function of different parts of the brain that is fairly uncontroversial. The fact that the human part of the brain is capable of sophisticated modelling of other people and of using similar models to predict the future is established scientific fact.

And what precisely does any of that have to do with what I wrote?

The economic crash is already happening, it was set into motion in March of 2020. The only thing that will change is they'll stop lying about it.

The existential horror of job security. This is what scared the boomers most in the 1990s.

50% increase in job cut announcements, but no increase in jobless claims.

I suspect this means The jobs being cut are good ones with severance that prevents you from filing a jobless claim.

The brains we have can be considered to have 3 different sections: the reptilian brain which is largely reactive and instinctual, the mammalian brain which works with emotions and memories, and the human brain that has higher thinking centers. Within the human brain is a powerful ability to model others minds, which in a sense is a form of telepathy, because we try to build models of those around us to understand them and see them. That isn't a rational process, it's subconscious and autonomous. It's paired with the broader function of our prefrontal cortex, which has the similarly amazing function of predicting the future, allowing us to predict and plan for future events.

To "fire on all cylinders" as a human with a big wrinkly brain then, you need to accept all modes of thinking. The rational brain is important because it can be used to reach places that are unintuitive through logic and reason, but the irrational brain or the subconscious brain is also equally or even more important because it can be used to places that are intuitively understandable but not necessarily rational or logical. That's why the paradox of understanding logically that the universe is meaningless, valueless, and senseless coexists with the understanding that there is nevertheless an intuitive meaning, value, and sense to the universe, and doesn't need to be rationalized. Both are true, but both are false. But depending on the situation, certain things are more true in that they are more useful to go with.

So while I agree in some ways, I'd suggest that you shouldn't make it an either/or situation.

If my view is correct, then your intuition does still need to be trained like your rational mind, and that's the benefit of society's ancient wisdom -- to help your intuition "kick in" and be able to use telepathy requires a base of intuitive knowledge about other people you don't automatically get, and that would be why some people are better "telepaths" than others.

I also go with my gut, but I've also got a highly developed moral sense I can rely on. That's a key thing. But where did that sense of awe in the face of deep virtue come from?

Unlike most people at most times, for whom a discussion like this is abstract, right now the discussion of moral development is extremely embodied, immediate, and relevant, since I'm raising a son who will have to navigate his own way through the world, and I have a limited amount of time to guide him. Maybe 10 years where he'll listen to me, then another 10 years where he won't be listening to me nearly as much, then he'll be on his own, assuming I'm even still alive by the end of that second 20 years.

If I assume that this little life in front of me will magically become moral because the universe has a clear objective morality that will be obvious, then I'm going to fail because that's untrue, and I'll raise a child who lacks virtue. Many people in my generation are doing just that. Immoral, illiterate kids who go on to fail at life. I could be long dead by the time this little boy reaches 40, he can't live in my basement until he's 40.

So you have to have a mental model for the idea that a new mind will need to build a model of virtue. Part of that is being a role model of virtuous behavior. Part of that is going out into the world and teaching virtue by doing things together and informing him how to behave in real-world circumstances and correcting him when he behaves in a manner that isn't virtuous. And part of that is telling the stories of our civilization which help the mind understand virtue by seeing it in different circumstances.

That moment you realize you didn't win, the tories lost

I love writing long posts that really poke and prod ideas, but holy hell they take a long time to write. And then sometimes I'm at the end and it's like "well, this all fits together, but I'm not sure if it's right or not?"

There's a big problem with this train of thought, and that's the ought-is problem. You can't get to morality from objectivity. There is no such thing as moral truth written into the objective universe. Thus, the phrase "The epistemological foundation of moral law" isn't really something that fits together with reality. There is no epistemological basis for moral law in a rational sense. You might counter that there are commonalities between humans, and to an extent you would be correct, but no particular human is objective, and the human race among all the known races isn't particularly special necessarily. A thing that is not human will have different values, and even different humans may have different values.

You have a morality imparted upon you by the civilization you live in and all the baggage attached to it. You think your morality is self-evident and self-proving to any rational person, but that's because you're a product of your civilization and have been built by those influences. In another society, the idea that an important man can't cut down an unimportant man where he stands would be ludicrous and offensive. In yet another society, the idea that a conqueror can't cut down the conquered would be ludicrous and offensive. There's an island in the pacific islands near India that has a neolithic tribe living there, and any human being who steps foot on their island is immediately murdered, and to do otherwise is considered ludicrous and offensive. In their own ways, they're all right, but they're also all incompatible with the idea that we're all equal in the eyes of God and thus it is wrong for one man to murder another.

The context here is a discussion where people suggest rejecting religion or fairy tales and other stories because they're "delusion". In that sense, if you reject those things then you're rejecting culture and history on a large scale, which is effectively assuming you can take facts and logic and magic yourself into a value system. The most famous attempt at this still ended up inheriting the values of the culture of the time, and still ended up the most murderous ideology in history. In another post in this thread, I talked about some examples of objective facts we learned from the crazy stories of the past, you can't just assume we know everything there is to know if we wipe all that out.

Objectively speaking, life on earth isn't meaningful. We all live on a tiny speck of dust surrounding an inconsequential star, and we're likely to be extinct within a mere million years or so, but even if we survive that we're going to eventually have to deal with our yellow dwarf star entering the red giant cycle and our planet and everything about it will be swallowed by billions of years of atomic fire until the sun uses up its fuel entirely and becomes an ultradense chunk of matter slowly cooling over millions more years. And we're unlikely to figure out any way out of the inevitable. All traces of the human race will be wiped out, anything you considered good, anything you considered evil, not that anyone or anything will ever even know we existed anyway, on a timeline that is possibly going to see the universe become a slowly dying and dwindling place over timespans we can't even begin to imagine.

Given that fact, and the fact that we'd all die out of despair if we think too hard about that sort of cosmic existential horror, we humans cluster around meaning or value we can find subjectively the same way our ancestors huddled around the primitive fires they learned to create out of nothing but sticks. Pretty it up with fancy words, but we're just trying to figure out the ways to live, and there's no mathematical equation for doing so. But those who came before us had ideas they thought worked, and so they'd pass those messages on through stories. And they also pass messages to us through genetics, where many subtle parts of our genome whisper in our ears about lessons those who came before us learned.

We have the capacity for both violence and peace, both prosocial and antisocial practices, because regardless of our personal desire for a peaceful and prosocial world, the world is an ever-changing place and individuals constantly will be tested with the reality that you can't always make friends, you can't always make peace, and people who are good sometimes or even often die. So we can't assume that one path or the other is written in the atoms of the universe, and we also can't assume that one path or the other has any moral value in the face of a truly nihilistic universe. We realize that, and that's one interpretation for why we stepped out of the garden of Eden when we ate the fruit of knowledge of good and evil -- once we understand its nature, we can never go back to the dumb primate bravado that we're definitely dong the right thing no matter what we do.

Postmodern man is an idiot. If we were as smart as we thought we were, we wouldn't be committing suicide. If we were as smart as we thought we were, we wouldn't be so depressed or otherwise mentally ill so widely. We're better off materially than many of our ancestors but they would say they're better off in ways that matter than we are. We think we're the most moral humans to have ever lived, but we tried to wipe our slates clean to get there, and that's not how human beings work. We lose our ancient wisdom, we lose the epistemological basis for the few things we think can actually work. Eventually we lose our morality because it's just loose sheets of paper sitting on a table.

I want to make it clear that I'm not necessarily saying that all morality is subjective in the sense of cultural relativism. What I'm saying is that there's a lot more going into a successful value system than we think, and we are arrogant to throw out the basis of our current values to think we'll somehow be able to do better without ancient wisdom trying to just wipe the slate clean and keep writing.

I'm definitely over-analyzing, it's kinda my thing.

Even if you take a step back and say that religion itself is delusional, I still think that something delusional can tell you something meaningful. Have you ever done dream analysis? Dreams are by definition nothing but delusion, but you can definitely tell things that parts of your mind you don't directly converse with are saying by the imagery and symbolism inside dreams. I've written before about my analysis of recurring dreams about buying old cars to fix up, and how that imagery is to me self-evidently about responsibility, and how at that time I was having those dreams I needed to be careful because I was taking on too many responsibility and like a bunch of used cars hanging out in your garage eventually things are so packed up you can't even do any work anyway and you have such a backlog you've overburdened yourself.

The thing about old stories whether you take them as religious doctrine or just old stories is that they've been around for a long time, and the information contained in such old stories can be very interesting. The story of the seven Pleiades sisters is quite interesting because for all of recorded history, it looked like six stars. However, about 200,000 years ago it would have appeared to be seven Stars. This tells us that this story was telling us about something that happened long before recorded history began. Similarly, there were a wide variety of archaeological finds that were discovered by simply looking at the old Legends such as The Iliad and looking in the places that the story is claimed had certain things happen. That's how they found what they believed to be the city of Troy, and something similar with the story of Theseus helped archaeologists find the Minoan civilization which was previously completely lost and forgotten. In the same way that these symbolic stories were able to tell us about archaeological and scientific facts, many of them can tell stories about moral or philosophical facts that our hyper rational and highly scientific civilization may have forgotten in the same way that we have forgotten about the Minoans.

Of course, you have to balance studies of ancient wisdom with living in the here and now, for a few reasons. For one thing, metaphor is pretty hazy over millennia, and you don't necessarily understand what they're trying to tell you. For example we didn't know about the story of the Pleiades until modern science learned that fact. For another, what was true a millennium ago may not be true today. The Bible tells us a lot about dealing with Romans, but the western Roman empire fell 600 years ago. Meanwhile, it doesn't tell us a whole lot about the Internet.

"Bank Of America Customers Report Widespread Outage, Zero Balances"

You know, if the bank wants to make my balances 0, I'm willing to make that sacrifice. It's a big hit they'll have to take, they'll have to add a lot of money to a lot of accounts, but it's a tough time and sacrifices must be made.

I know guys like that. God literally asks them a question and they're like "fuck off, I didn't do nuthin"

Then he's all shocked that God doesn't give him a raise.