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Cake day: July 28th, 2023

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  • Excellent and much needed context, compared to just seeing images of contextually devoid book vandalism, and being trusted to assume a kind of naive, perhaps bad faith idiocy.

    I legitimately wonder if there’s really any level of protest that people will tolerate. If you throw soup on the protective glass that covers a painting, prepare to get slammed with a 20 minute protracted conversation about whether or not soup can leak between the gaps in the fixtures that secure a painting to the wall, and whether or not that amount of soup can do damage, and how much money we’re all paying for it to be cleaned up, and how seeing a painting is a once in a lifetime thing which is now ruined for the people who went and so on and so on. If you block traffic, well, now I’ve had to spend 2 or 3 hours in delays, and there’s no cause that’s really worth a minor inconvenience. The protesting crowd should all get gunned down for that. At the very least, they all deserve to know that nothing they’re doing can every really matter or change anything ever.

    Then of course, none of that’s actually related to the issue we really want to discuss, there, that’s all just tangential, complicated political issues, that we’re primed to bellyache and whine about. We can only show how much we care by donating to some nonprofit, while we go about our lives ideally uninterrupted an uninconvinienced by the protesters. I feel like I must’ve stumbled on this thread dozens of times already, and it never really gets any better.

    I think what drives the root cause of this is some kind of nihilism, some sense that nothing can ever get any better, and if you think otherwise, you’re naive. That we really just exist to keep everything in a permanent deadlock. If you were to take more extreme action than this, well, no, that’s morally abhorrent, whomever will just get replaced by the institutional successor, and oh, you’re causing X amount of property destruction, which is X amount of economic value, thus, X amount of time, and thus, X amount of lifespan for someone. Then you’ve basically committed murder, if not mass murder, by wasting so many lifetimes. The many, sometimes literal, murders of the status quo otherwise need not apply, or else are assumed to be inevitable. Even if your actions here were somehow directly materially related to the conflict, right, it would be all too easy to just dismiss it out of hand as being not really effective, or as being adventurism or a waste of everyone’s time. Can’t I just get back to the perennial Big Game? I just wanna grill for God’s sake!



  • I still like watching fat men in nappies with waxed hairstyles throwing salt around a clay circle then trying to push each other out of it though.

    Yeah see that’s why I can’t ever take anyone’s opinion on it seriously, because they just say shit like this. It’s like, only a step away from “oh Americans should be good at sumo because Americans are all fat right and you just need to be fat and they wear diapers right?”. Which itself is about two steps away from just like, “Haha look at the funny fat men and how fat they are, what freaks for being fat.”, which is an incredibly depressing sentiment. It’s like calling baseball boring. I mean yeah, it is, but obviously, baseball fans will hate it if you say that, because it being boring as fuck is kind of the point of the sport. If you watch the matches you can tell pretty easily that most of them aren’t faked.

    Nah, man, it’s a grappling art with a pretty large amount of universal applicability and no real weight classes, more similar to the conventional folk wrestling styles that many different cultures have. Mongolian jacket wrestling, mud wrestling, lots of European countries even have folk wrestling styles that they don’t care about too much anymore. It’s more similar to Judo, or something, and most people don’t question the efficacy or reality of Judo. American folk wrestling became rough-and-tumble fighting, and also became carnie circus shit right after the civil war, and then spread around everywhere until the Japanese decided to just kind of make it real with shooto and basically start MMA as we know it today, arguably with some interference from Brazilian Vale Tudo guys. The UFC’s involvement mostly being tenuous carnie shit. Go watch like the first three or four UFC’s, it’s basically garbage.

    The more complicated download on the match fixing that came about in sumo is that 14 wrestlers were convicted, some stable masters. The sport as a whole, as with many sports in Japan, has a bunch of Yakuza involvement and toxic hazing and other bullshit. There’s already a Wikipedia link on it. Hakusho just got massively demoted like last year because some jackass in his stable was found to be hazing newcomers and haranguing people for money. I dunno, somehow I’m not gonna call all boxing rigged just because every now and again they find out that some high profile match was rigged due to the nature of the sport’s overarching regulatory structure.


  • Sports with direct confrontation, hell, even any sport, don’t need fairness to be good. I’d say that fairness actually destroys enjoyment of a sport, a lot of the time. Now, sometimes that can not be the case, as a totally even set match can be impressive to watch just based on how the kind of, pachinko machine pays out, right. Depending on your definition of fairness, once we attain fairness, all that’s keeping the match from becoming a draw every time is pure random chance. You have to define random chance as not being sort of, antithetical to fairness.

    Watching the high-level pachinko machine can still be fascinating, can still be entertaining. But overall, the fairness is actually an inhibition to sport, a lot of the time. People want a david vs goliath moment, if you ask them. I would just as well give that to them, easily, right, like, no question in my mind. Obviously there’s a balance to be had, but, that’s the job of commissioners, to come up with that shit after the fact, or in relation to viewership numbers.


  • Nah fuck that shit. MMA integrated weight classes and that’s sucked. Sumo is the only true martial art, straight up, not even pulling your leg right now

    Edit: Yeah, I mean, men are “stronger” pound for pound or whatever, but, we kind of, are idiots when it comes to thinking of sports, if we just suddenly think all sports are about explosive type 1 muscles, or muscular structure, or whatever. That’s dumb, that’s a brainlet comparison and a brainlet appeal, I would say. If you gain leverage in one direction, you lose it in another. If you gain a bunch of type one muscle fibers, you become a chimpanzee, but also, you gas really, really quickly, and humans are endurance predators that maximize that endurance with fine motor control even in what might be considered gross motor action. Everyone has this conception of sports as being these kinds of, oh, instant action gratification machines, where you just watch some guy get hit in the face really hard, or get tackled, and your monkey brain goes coco mode, and so obviously explosive strength is gonna be good for these displays, so, men are better at sports.

    This is not the case. Or at least, not entirely. Sports is more like a long-form storytelling vehicle with many different characters and mindless teams to it. Women can fulfill that role just as easily as men can, in many of the same contexts. If we have sports that are bad for co-ed play, then I would say, we have sports that perhaps need refining.

    Which everyone thinks is somehow like, a horrible thing to do, oh no, the sports, they’re too sacred, we gotta find the best of the best, but sports have always been and remain subject to change and a ton of different shitty rulesets that everyone always hates. Basketball now, apparently, rewards a bunch of aggressive highlight-reel kinds of play, and apparently the older game used to be more defensive, I say apparently because I dunno. I know nascar has had the opposite trending for quite some time with limiter plates meant to protect drivers and the audience more at the cost of more spectacular crashes and pileups for which the sport might gain more casual viewership. And also not be boring as fuck driving in a circle for like three hours. That’s not a sport getting better or worse, that’s just some arbitrary cultural shift, a decision made, realistically, because of internal cost-benefit analysis at the behest of a corporation which runs the major league.

    We might have the same capacity to integrate sports into a co-ed kind of a deal, if we had the will to do so, but I think the truth of the matter is just that nobody really gives a shit about equality, except for when you bring it up.

    Me, I’m a fan of sumo, because fuck weight classes. I wanna see david beat goliath. To me, that’s a more compelling casual narrative that can easily be built into a sport. Fairness is highly overrrated, and also doesn’t exist, or else every match might as well just be random chance, or end in a draw. Michael phelps is some genetic freak or whatever. Go cry me a river, and then he can swim across it and back. Give me an abstract goal like “get ball through hope” or “throw guy out of ring” and then I don’t need any more to it, I’m right there with you.


  • Hayes is not a checkout aisle self-help book lol he pioneered multiple major branches of CBT

    I mean, both can be true, right. It’s not uncommon for pretty popular scientists to get into kind of the grift economy after a little while. Jordan peterson has how many citations to his scientific papers or whatever? But then he still rolls around and spews a bunch of bullshit that’s sort of framed under the guise of his psychological background, and you can still tell is pretty easily influenced by his jungian type bullshit. I dunno, been a while since I actually looked into him, but it shook my ability to trust psychology more as a field, after that one.

    I admire the skepticism but you haven’t read it and clearly haven’t taken time to fully understand it. he isn’t making prescriptive claims. he’s speaking on behavioral science. “A happens, then B tends to happen. C happens, then D tends to happen. do what you will with this info.”

    No yeah for sure I haven’t read it, don’t claim to have read it, I’m just extremely skeptical of that kind of book, which presents science to the public at large, because most of the experiences I’ve had with that sort of thing have been damaging psuedoscientific bullshit that I slowly have to talk my friends out of. Which becomes much harder when they think they know things on a topic because they’ve read like one book about it. I don’t even try to talk them into a different stance, I just try to talk them out of the kind of, oversimplified takes which they tend to get from these types of books. Steven pinker type books, “Guns, Germs, and Steel” type books, “The Bell Curve” type books, “How to Win Friends and Influence People”, “Poor Dad, Rich Dad”, shit like that. Admittedly not all of those are science guys, and some of that shit’s kind of old, but, you see what I’m getting at, it all blends together for the public. Pop psychology, that’s probably the term for that specific type of book, and uhh, yeah, that book gave me that kind of vibe.

    If I’m really being skeptical, than, not evaluating anything else, because I just got up and still haven’t finished my coffee, the first study at the end of your post has two experiments. The first has a sample size of 34, the second has a sample size of 44. I dunno if I would say that you can really extrapolate anything from such an incredibly small sample size, to be honest. Especially one that’s like, taken from standard college campus volunteers. I know there are lots of scientific studies that rely on sample sizes which are pretty small, and I would throw that criticism at those studies, too. Shit happens in nutrition and exercise science too, I know for sure, which is why you see shitty fad diets circulate so much. I dunno, maybe I’ll read the rest of the paper, but that’s just like my general, me throwing shit at psychology as a field, right? But, maybe more, like, maybe more to, I think, some sort of point, if I have it, right:

    and we humans clearly need treatment.

    Like what do you mean by this? Because you’re looking at this through “treatments”, right, and I dunno if that’s the correct lens with which to view most people’s problems that they have in life. I mean it’s not a fuckin, incredibly new take, right, but like, you have a society where you’re expected to work 9-5, probably more, hours, five days a week, probably go in on a rental with your significant other, or increasingly, with your significant others, for like, 60 something years of your life? It’s not a shocker when we’re experiencing increasing amounts of depression at large, then, to me. That people have problems with that. I mean like, does changing society at large, qualify as a kind of patient treatment? I suppose my problem, if I’m really trying to have one, is just kind of that like, there’s not really any amount of psychological help which makes it better that your fingers are getting crushed in industrial machinery. Psychological help, in that case, just looks like copium. I don’t think psychology can help a lot of those problems, I think the best it can do is put a band-aid over a crippling tumor, which is nothing.

    If you were to ask me what we were to do with the mentality I have, I’d probably want to incredibly balloon sample sizes and drastically increase the amount of evidence that we’re collecting, compared to just like, some guy’s written observations on like 50 people in some random experiment. Probably though, this is impossible, because school funding does not look to be going up anytime soon and google isn’t gonna share their massive amounts of data they’re collecting on people, and even if we had a glut of data to go through then we’d probably still be having to come up with and apply some sort of framework to it. At which point we just end up with a bunch of hacky bullshit, where you just take the noise and draw something in it and then say that this was somehow a natural occurrence, so you’d also need more rigorous standards for what conclusions we’re actually able to draw from the noise.

    Then, even if you were able to do that, you’d still have no real way of distinguishing, say, one set of noise from another set of noise, to compare the two and draw a conclusion, because we’re just playing with like, one set of data, in a vacuum, compared to another set of data drawn from a vacuum, and there’s too many variables which might effect one outcome compared to another. So you’d probably need to be gathering pretty rigorous data over the course of many years before you’d be able to draw a real conclusion. Even then, the data might not be good enough, I dunno if you’d have enough information.

    I’d maybe lean more into neuroscience to try and cut out some of the external noise, some of the factors that might fuck your shit up, but then that’s also not quite a good method because it doesn’t really cut out the external noise so much as ignore it, and you can still end up finding FMRI signals in a dead fish.

    So, I dunno, probably I’d just use science for maths and astronomy and physics, stuff like that, and then otherwise I’d dismiss it, in looking for philosophies and methods with which to live my life or shape my being around. Or, you know, try to take it as it comes, and not really accept claims at face value. I’ve tried mindfulness, and I’ve found it wanting, because it just caused me to dissociate whenever I encountered an outcome I didn’t really like, and then instead of responding to things naturally, and flying by instinct, it causes me to kind of be like, the guy who smokes weed and then becomes hyper-aware of everything they’re doing but then their actual behavior devolves into nonsense.

    Then, when I got farther than that, and I started to observe that behavior in the abstract, then it just sort of struck me as like, none of this realistically gives you a particular value judgement, right. It’s fine enough to just say, like, ah, well, think about it more, evaluate your life more, think about the long term consequences a little more. But, that train of thought doesn’t necessarily mean I’m going to be making the correct judgements, and even over a lifetime, it might very well be that I could try everything and still come to the wrong conclusions, wrong judgements, or the right conclusions and right judgements, or whatever. I could be a hyper-conscious CEO evaluating my own life totally inaccurately and still be getting by fine and dandy, and I could be a homeless guy with accurate takes but still have a shit life. It’s basically nonsense, to just be like, oh, well, think about it a little bit harder, just be a little bit more conscious, because that isn’t nailed down to anything in particular.


  • I mean that’s definitely just a checkout aisle self-help book, though. Psychology, along with nutritional science and some other softer, more survey-based fields, has been suffering a pretty massive replication crisis, where something like 50% of papers are totally incapable of being replicated, depending on the journal and subject.

    So I dunno, I’d generally be pretty skeptical of anything a book like that says about how you have to live your life or what you should be doing or how you should be doing it. Even if it’s something like “mindfulness”, right, generally thought to be a therapeutic practice, which we’re extracting from zen buddhism or whatever, just like carl jung travels around and extracts a bunch of “archetypes” from other cultures and then supposes that they’re universal when really it’s all just kinda some schizo bullshit canon he’s coming up with on the fly.

    I uhh, I don’t like the scientific paint that is painted onto psychology and psychotherapy, is I guess what I’m saying. The attempt at formalization. What is just as good for one person, to be mindful, is probably something that someone else should rather not think about at all. Maybe even as a functional adaptation, a functional delusion that they can go on believing, and still end up having a fulfilling and uplifting life for everyone around them.



  • Yeah, I think this problem is mostly solved if people were more willing to take their obviously highly produced and edited scripts and just make those publicly accessible with sources and whatnot, which they presumably need to basically do anyways in order to have good captioning on their video. The main problem isn’t so much that they use videos, to me, but that we have no way to sort through leagues of text documents and blogs now. Harder for me to subscribe to and read a blog in a dedicated fashion, I guess. I dunno, I guess ultimately I’m just saying that the two mediums need more connection, which would be mutually beneficial, I think.



  • Google maps won’t give you a route at all in public transit if you include multiple stops. I think generally, for public transit, you either have to use google maps to extensively look up and plan your own route, or you have to use a different app. There’s one just called “transit”, which I think people generally use, has good integration, and sometimes local agencies have their own app or will use a different one, there’s a handful of generalized ones.

    But yeah, in any case. Probably, Google should be better about that.


  • “Dicks fuck pussies, and Dicks also fuck assholes”. Greatest speech ever

    Yeah, that’s what I was referring to. The movie came out in 2004, you know, the year after we invaded Iraq, as was the context of the movie. If you pay attention to that speech, it’s basically just saying that US hegemony is good and US exceptionalism is real, and that our actions are a net positive for the international community. That the international community needs us. That we need to “fuck this asshole”. In combination with the movie making fun of celebrities that had non-interventionist views, and calling them a homosexual slur that will probably get flagged on lemmy, saying that they suck up to dictators. It being satire doesn’t suddenly make the movie mean the opposite of what it meant, that’s just classic irony-poisoning.


  • I mean Team America was a pretty lowkey pro military intervention and pro america movie, to be honest. He’d probably have the opinion he would have if he had watched that movie and especially if he’d listened to the classic longwinded matt and trey speech that they throw in at the end to kind of spell out the message, it’s just that nobody really watches or remembers anything other than the like, first 20 minutes of that movie, where the protagonists get hit with kind of a low point and “america” kind of looks bad, because those first twenty minutes make the most memorable use of the gag.


  • This is the case for basically every issue, yeah, this is generally why telling people to start with politics at the local level isn’t really a great suggestion for most people.

    You can’t fund inter-city trains at the local level, really, that has to be done at the state level at the very least, usually in a state like california, only, and usually it has to be done with federal funding. If you don’t have inter-city trains or public transit, then it’s hard to make a walkable city. Basically what I’m saying is that it’s not atomizable, it has to be integrated with the rest of the network, which is why even the best US cities are pretty car-centric.

    This is true for a litany of other political issues besides just public transit.




  • Huckleberries. I never see them as a commonly available thing in stores, eaten alongside things like bananas, which sucks, because bananas are some plant grown like a thousand miles away and I can go outside and go gather my own huckleberries if I wanted. It should be really easy, I live in an area where they grow.

    So, that, but also just more broadly I kind of think that after learning enough about different regional botany, we’ve both crippled basically every ecosystem with a bunch of invasive species, we’ve crushed the human experience into a very narrow square set of experiences which includes the biodiversity that you can see around wherever you are, and we’ve made food worse. Because we’re not using local plants for our food, you see, we’re just using a bunch of generic ingredients that are sort of unnaturally made out to be universal across entire hemispheres, maybe even across the globe. No regional variation outside of specialty goods, only Mcdonald’s.

    The thread’s gonna be against this opinion broadly, I think, but there’s not like, it’s not just the huckleberry, you understand, there’s a lot more out there that you don’t know about, both edible and not.